


the desert turned to sea

by focusfixated



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Abuse, Childhood to Present Day, Early Days, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Post-Strike, Recovery, Slow Burn, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-02-23 20:38:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 26,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18709561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/pseuds/focusfixated
Summary: “New York’s home, ain’t it?” Race shrugs. “Always has been, always will.”Around them, buildings stack up against the horizon, the grimy aftermath of yesterday’s rain staining every wall and surface. “And you don’t want nothin’ more?” Jack says.Race stubs out his half-smoked cigarette. “What else is there?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this story is now complete. i owe everything in its inception to [clarabeau](https://clarabeau.tumblr.com/).

> _After nine days I let the horse run free_  
>  _'Cause the desert had turned to sea_  
>  _There were plants and birds and rocks and things_  
>  _There was sand and hills and rings_  
>  _The ocean is a desert with its life underground_  
> 

*****

When he is only six years old, Jack Kelly wakes up one morning to find his Ma dead in her bed.

His Pa isn’t home, and it’s unusually quiet in the small apartment, no footsteps on the floorboards above, no commotion on the streets below. 

Jack lies awake, listening carefully to the cotton-thick silence pressing woolly and strange deep into his ears. After a moment, he stands and walks across the room to the bed interrupted by a heavy, motionless shape. Clara Sullivan is lying, eyes closed, and still. 

It’s the dust in her lungs from the mill followed by the nasty New York winter chill that got her, the doctor says to his Pa when he comes home. It's a blessing she didn't suffer too long. 

The news spreads fast through their apartment building, morbid gossip moving in quick whispers from floor to floor, and there’s several knocks on the door from neighbours with brief condolences and poorly-disguised curiosity. They stand in the doorway with sympathetic faces, but their eyes stray to the apartment beyond, beady and callous, searching eagerly for ghostlike traces in the dead woman's wake. 

Jack sees them come and go, empty-feeling. He can’t understand the difference between _then_ when his Ma was there, and _now_ when she’s not. His Pa goes out again, door clicked shut unfeelingly behind him, and Jack’s left to sit alone on the dirty apartment floor. The low-hanging winter sunlight hits the iron fire escape through the window and fills his eyes with spots. He blinks, and his lashes are wet.

In the dust-grey room empty of anyone who can hear him, Jack starts to cry. He cries, and he cries, until he makes himself sick. 

Later that night, Jack’s laid down on his bed, head pounding from the sticky-thick fog of tears that have been wrung out of him, when suddenly there’s the sound of boots on the stairs – an irregular, staggering weight that Jack knows off by heart. He knows the sound, and he recognises the smell, too, when it comes. Whiskey-damp breath and drying sweat, the sharp wet of the outdoor cold, tobacco on fingers and hands, city grime and strange perfumes. 

Jack closes his eyes, blocking out the moonlight that floods the room in dusty silver, blocking the sight of his Pa outlined by the window, with his blurry eyes and red-flushed cheeks. 

“Go to sleep,” Clara Sullivan whispers, and Jack holds on tight to the shape of her memory, the steady lightness of her body lying on the bed next to him. “Shall I read you a story?”

Jack nods, and in a quiet voice, quiet enough so his Pa doesn’t hear them, Clara Sullivan reads from the pages of a book in her lap – Jack’s favourite book, a tatty paperback with a picture of a red road and an orange sunset on the front, about a cowboy, name of Jack Kelly, and his adventures out West. 

The sharp slap to the back of his head jerks Jack out of a drifting, dizzy half-sleep. His face is hot and itchy and damp with tears. 

“Shut that racket,” Francis Sullivan slurs. “Or I'll make ya.”

Jack wipes a clumsy fist over his eyes and swallows his dried-out hiccups, and falls silent.

*****

Before he became Jack Kelly – before the events that led him down that road – Jack was Francis Sullivan, Jr., the only son of Clara and Francis Sullivan, Sr.

He's a runty kind of kid; small and skinny, with hollow-looking cheeks. Other kids think he’s strange, this small boy who never speaks, with his dirty clothes and filthy fingernails, his greasy hair growing long, curling past his ears and to his collar, long like a girl’s. His Ma used to cut it for him, and now she doesn’t. 

Jack gets into a lot of fights. They almost always end with his nose leaking blood, his lips split and sore, cuts and scrapes on his elbows and knees from getting pushed to the floor, taunts in his ears and his eyes watering from the dust kicked in them. The other kids hold him down, and he twitches and writhes like a gasping fish waiting to get gutted. 

One of these fights starts in the schoolyard. Jack finds himself standing face-to-chin with Ade Minelli, a fat kid with big fists and a big mouth who kicks at boys smaller than him and pulls at girls’ hair until they cry. Jack’s heard what people say about Minelli Sr. – how he’s a crook and a dangerous man, frequenting the kind of dark-windowed establishments no respectable people go. Then again, Jack’s heard the same thing said about his Pa, too.

The first punch comes to his stomach, and he doubles over, and before he can get his breath back there’s another blow to the side of his ribs, sending him stumbling, right into Minelli who reaches around his neck to put him in a headlock, his other hand fisted in Jack’s too-long hair, yanking hard enough to make it sting. 

“C’mon, Frankie,” Ade Minelli sneers in his bullish voice, right into Jack’s ear. “You’s fightin’ like a little girl.” He releases Jack from the headlock, and Jack staggers, falling to the floor onto his backside, tears springing up in his eyes. Minelli laughs. “Little Frankie Sullivan,” he sing-songs, “daddy’s a dirty cheat and mommy was a whore.” 

The kick Jack lands to Ade Minelli’s knees makes the boy yell, and through the mist of rage, Jack feels a furious satisfaction. It’s a lucky shot, really – Minelli was too busy jeering to see Jack coming, and even Jack didn’t know he could kick that hard, or that Minelli’s knees could make such an ugly, crunching noise as he crumples to the ground. Whimpering and curled in on himself, snotty tears are streaming from Minelli’s round, red face. Jack draws his fist back and punches the kid once, twice, right in the face and hard enough to knock a tooth out. 

Ade Minelli crawls away howling, and Jack gets sent from school for fighting.

Later that night, Jack’s Pa storms into their one-room apartment with thunder in his face and an ugly twist to his mouth. Jack’s sitting on the single mattress that lies in the corner by the wall in the empty room, stacking matchsticks quietly into a small tower, ignoring the ache in his knuckles.

Jack’s only got a second to gulp in a breath before his Pa’s grabbed him by the collar, spilling matchsticks all over the floor, pushing him up against the wall. He looks angry, but there’s also that mad, wide look in his eyes that always looks to Jack like he’s scared. 

“What’s this I been hearin’ ‘bout you and Minelli’s kid?” Jack’s Pa says. Francis Sullivan’s a skinny man, tall and lean like he’s been squeezed through a mangle, but his bony fingers on Jack feel like steel.

Jack remembers how Ade Minelli’s had screamed in white-faced shock as he’d spat out his bloody tooth. “Didn’t do nothin’,” he says.

When Francis Sullivan smacks Jack round the face, Jack’s only glad his Pa isn’t big like Ade Minelli’s Pa, who’s got one arm thicker than Jack’s whole body, and a red face like a fat bull scorched by the Mexico sun. Jack lets the blow rock his head sideways, ragdoll-limp. It smarts, but it could be worse. 

“Dirty liar. I seen Minelli just now dragging the kid back kickin’ an’ screamin’ up a racket about how you knocked his teeth out.” Francis Sullivan is standing so close Jack can feel the warm, damp bloom of his breath in and out like a panting dog on his skin. It doesn’t smell of anything for once, no whiskey, no bitter, boozy sourness, but Jack can’t help flinching back from the closeness of it anyway. 

“Didn’t do nothin’,” Jack says again. His eyes swim as he stares at the burst red veins in his Pa’s nose, pressing almost tip-to-tip with his own, fine red lines blooming angrily on his greasy, sweat-sticky skin.

“Minelli says you did. Says you bit his kid, like some kinda animal.”

“Didn’t,” Jack says, thinking, with a blissful kind of vindictiveness, about how much he’d liked how it had felt, biting hard into Ade Minelli’s fat arm, grinding the meat of it between his teeth. 

Francis Sullivan yanks Jack forward and then back again, so that Jack’s head bashes against the wall. His vision spots, a disorientating dizziness bursting like a sudden headache from the back of his skull. “Liar,” his Pa spits again. “If you ain’t been fightin’ where’s that black eye you got come from?”

Jack’s head is throbbing, face stinging, and there’s a mean, rotted feeling in his gut. “You,” he says.

The second crack from the back of his Pa’s hand hurts more where his cheek’s already sore, knuckles catching the protrusion of his cheekbone, and Jack feels the sharp-hot sting spread across his skin. 

“You listen to me,” Frank Sullivan says, bony finger jabbing Jack hard in the centre of Jack’s chest, and his Pa’s eyes are wide again with that mad-scared look he gets, unpredictable in its appearance, but stomach-twisting in its familiarity. “Gettin’ on the wrong side of Minelli, it’s bad for business. If business goes bad, it’s over. That’s it. No money, we don’t got nothin’ to eat, we don’t got nowhere to live. If business goes bad, it’s the poorhouse, or jail, and it’d be you who put us there.” He shakes Jack sharply. “You hearin’ me, kid?”

Jack stares at the wall where his head is turned. There’s greasy stains all over it, and cracks in the paint. He nods.

“Good,” Francis says, roughly, and he lets go. Jack sinks to the ground, legs jelly-soft and a sick taste in his mouth, face still stinging. “Don’t let me hear about anythin’ like this again.” And without looking back, Francis walks out the door, and slams it shut behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lyrics: [a horse with no name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEHBTjIYejE)


	2. Chapter 2

Irving Hall looms large and grand in front of Jack, lit up inside and outside in a haloed orange glow, large printed playbills and painted likenesses of dancing girls in purple feathers hanging on the exterior walls, riotously colourful and noisy as the town market on a spring afternoon. 

His Pa takes him there, steering Jack with a grip on his shoulder, towards the front steps framed by white pillars gone grey in the grime of the city, and then, sharply, off to the right, down the side of the building where the lights are dimmer, and Jack feels the ground grow rougher under his feet. 

They get to a doorway, lit by an oily yellow flicker, where a man, thickset and standing double Jack’s height at least, steps forward when he sees them. Jack shrinks back, but his Pa puts a hand out to greet him. 

“Moreno,” he says, easily. His hand stays outstretched, expectant.

“Sullivan,” the man says. He pauses, mouth pursed and downturned, but he shakes Frank’s hand with a heavy, reluctant movement.

“Miss Larkson’s expectin’ me.”

“So she said. And is she expectin’ any trouble?”

“Ain’t that your job, Moreno? Dealin’ with trouble?” Francis is smiling, but the man he’s speaking to is stone-set, eyes flicking up and over Francis with distaste, looking down on him the way Jack always sees people looking at them – like they’re no good, like they’re not to be trusted. Jack shrinks behind his Pa and puts his head down. His hair, filthy and too long, swings across his face.

“It’s my job to make sure none a’ that trouble gets back to Miss Larkson.”

Francis presses a hand to his chest. “Wouldn’t dream of lettin’ that happen.”

They stand eyeing each other, Francis several inches shorter and about half as wide as the man in front of him, rangy and lean in the face of this meathead, but he doesn’t flinch, or look away, and Jack can’t help but feel awed at the way his Pa stands, drawing himself up. After a moment, Moreno steps back, and opens the door behind him with a grunt, and Francis nods and walks on through. “Good luck tonight, Sullivan,” Moreno calls to their retreating backs, in a nasty voice that sounds like he doesn’t mean it at all. Jack’s Pa purses his lips and doesn’t answer. 

They walk down a short corridor of side-by-side rooms, closed doors muffling a curious buzz of mixed sounds, low voices, bursts of high laughter, the clinks of glassware and constant pattering footsteps, the sharp clack of heels and soft, tinkling music.

Then they come to a stop in front of a large, painted door with a fancy brass knob that glows burnished copper in the dim light, and there are little roses carved into the panels. Francis Sullivan clears his throat, passes a hand through his slick hair, and knocks three times. When the door swings open, there’s a woman standing there – and Jack feels something inside him stop, just for a moment, as he looks at her, all of her, too much, almost, to see all at once. 

She’s tall, coming close to a height with Jack’s Pa, and taller still on account of the pink, satiny heels she’s wearing, buckled with a tiny rose that looks only big enough for a doll. Standing in the doorway, she’s haloed in sparkling lights that blink from around a dressing table, covered all over with glinting jewels that catch the light, and brushes and paints and all sorts of things Jack doesn’t recognise but that make up every colour that he does. 

There are pink flowers nestled in the woman’s red hair, the petals too regular to be real, and pink feathers falling like the tail of some bird Jack’s never seen down from her sharply pulled-in waist. The shape of her is like an insect, Jack thinks, strange and angular - but she's soft, too, spilling fleshy and white from her dress which is short and almost not there at all.

Francis Sullivan half-bows, inclining his head. “Miss Medda,” he says, and his voice is a soft murmur, a strangely unfamiliar sound to Jack. “Lookin’ pretty as a picture tonight.” He takes a bunch of flowers from behind his back and hands them over. They’re wilted and far past fresh in the late summer heat. 

Miss Medda takes them, but she doesn’t smell them, or look at them after more than a passing glance. “That’s real sweet of you,” she says. “You’re a charmer, Frank.”

There are sounds coming from behind Medda, high and excited, smattered with bursts of laughter and snatches of song, and the name _Sullivan_ whispered in women’s voices. 

A girl with hair so blonde it’s almost white appears at the door next to Medda. She’s wearing pink satiny shoes on her feet too, but the rest of her is only half-dressed in white undergarments, a cream corset and a garter belt with the same sharply pulled-in waist Medda has. Her stockings have a wide hole in them just above the knee. Jack looks up at her, mouth parted. She winks at him, and Jack feels his face heat up as he closes his mouth and looks away. 

“Miss Mindy, ain’t you a sight,” Francis says, and his eyes travel up the length of the girl’s legs. “The angels must be lookin’ out for me this evenin’.”

“Save the sweet talk for your games, Sullivan. I hear De Luca’s on the prowl. Angels might not be enough.”

“Ah, what’d’I want from angels anyway, when I got someone sweet as you on my side? You’re my good luck charm, Mindy, haven’t I always told you that?”

Miss Mindy smiles, a coy flash of sharp teeth. “You _are_ a charmer, Frank.”

“Mindy, doll,” Medda interrupts, “put these with the others.” She hands over the flowers, and they droop, clammy-wet in the sweat-warm heat.

“Sure thing, Miss Medda,” Miss Mindy says, but she glances over her shoulder with lowered lashes at Jack’s Pa as she walks away. 

“What you bring the kid for, Frank?” Medda says then, tilting her head down at Jack. Her voice is quiet, elastic with a New York accent but softened by a place Jack’s unfamiliar with. 

Frank pushes Jack forward. “I need a favour, Medda. Need him outta trouble for a little while. Boy can’t seem to stop gettin’ into fights while his Pa’s out tryn’a make an honest livin’.”

“An honest living,” Miss Medda says, and she smiles a little. “Frank, you never came by anything honestly in your life.” 

“I came by you honest enough,” Frank says, quiet. He lifts a hand to Medda’s cheek.

“Don’t,” Medda says, pulling back, but Frank follows her forward, and strokes a thumb across her skin anyway, deliberate, tracing the line of the prominent bone there before curling around the back of her neck. Jack watches, and he feels a cold writhing in his stomach at the touch, and he thinks, nonsensically, of what his Ma would say if she could see. 

“Just need a favour, Medda,” Frank says. “That’s all.”

Medda steps back, and Frank’s hand stays on her for a moment, before dropping away.

Cheeks a little flushed, Medda takes a deep breath, and then crouches down to Jack’s eye level, a vision of pink before him. She even _smells_ pink, Jack thinks, pink and sweet like the fancy cakes in the window of Mr. Zablocki’s bakery that look like they taste good, heavenly, sugar-sweet and soft in your mouth, only Jack’s never been allowed to try one. She smiles her pink smile at him. “This the first time you’re gonna see a vaudeville show, kid?”

“Yes ma’am,” Jack says, polite as he can, heart thudding oddly in his chest. 

“You like music, and dancing?”

Jack doesn’t know, but he says, “Yes ma’am.” 

“And pretty girls?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says. “You’s the prettiest one I ever saw.”

Medda laughs, and the sound’s pink too – light and rosy, like a songbird or a music box. “A real charmer, just like your Pa.” Medda straightens up. “Alright, Frank. Leave him with me.”

“You’re a doll, Medda,” Francis says. “Keep an eye, he can be a handful, this one,” and he takes hold of Jack’s arm, fingers around the width of it, pressing tight into the slots of old bruises. He turns Jack to face him. “You remember your manners, alright? No fightin’. I don’t wanna hear nothin’ come back to me about Francis Sullivan’s kid doing nothin’ he ain’t supposed to. I got important business, tonight.”

Jack nods. He knows how that goes. He’s seen how his Pa cleans the dirt out from under his fingernails and combs his hair back, wears his best shirt, the one that doesn’t have holes in it or yellow stains under the arms, pretending he isn’t what they whisper about him behind his back, pretending he’s a man of reputation and respect, pretending he’s got more than dirt and holes in his pockets, because when they think you already have money, it’s so much easier to get.

Francis Sullivan says it ain’t lying; it’s just improving the truth a little. 

“I’ll fetch him later,” Frank says, nodding at Medda. “If he gives ya any trouble—” He lifts his hand up and makes an aborted backhand towards Jack. He doesn’t hit, but Jack flinches anyway. 

“Go, Frank,” Medda says. “I can handle a kid.”

With a nod and a last, stern look at Jack, Frank turns and goes. 

“Come on, honey,” Medda says, and her voice sounds sadder now, a sigh shifting through her words. “Dolly and Sal have their boys backstage tonight, too. You can watch the show together.” She takes Jack’s hand, and leads him away.

*****

There's a man who plays the piano who they all call Cuddy, who’s got soft curly hair and plays with his eyes shut, smiling into his music and feeling his way across the keys. The girls also call him handsome, on account of how tall and slender he is, how his fingers are long and elegant, and when his eyes aren’t shut they’re a deep, dark brown and they look kindly on everyone.

Jack watches the show when Medda’s onstage, avidly, greedily awed by the wonder of their singing and dancing. Between Medda, the girls, the coloured feathers they wear and painted backdrops behind them, showing faraway lands covered in ice, or thickets of tall trees higher than buildings, or vast, wide rivers making mirrors for the sun, Jack’s eyes are filled with more things than he’s ever dreamed about.

And he finds himself looking over to Cuddy too, and his piano, and the calming port in the tumult he makes. Even when the music is loud and frenzied, Cuddy concentrates, focused somehow as everything moves around him, and then he bows, quiet and modest at the end of the night. 

Watching Cuddy means Jack notices things that Cuddy does, that other people who have eyes only for Medda and the girls might not see. Like the way that, when Cuddy’s eyes aren’t closed, they stray often to the bar where Mal dries glasses with a rag, slinging it over his shoulder for a moment to pause, to listen, to watch Cuddy back.

Jack likes how much they smile, even when it looks secret and hidden at the edge of their mouths. 

One evening, when Medda and the girls are in their dressing room, changing out of the heels that give them blisters and unpinning their hair, Jack’s walking down the corridor, a little hazy on account of the beer Mindy let him take a sip of. The summer heat suffuses the air in the building, thick with the lingering sweat of the audience, and the murmur of their voices, long gone this late at night but still buzzing in Jack’s ears. 

His Pa hasn’t come to find him yet. He might not come tonight at all, if he forgets, or has more pressing business – and Jack hopes, every time, that Frank won’t turn up, so that Jack can stay here a little longer, where everything is warm and glowing like a dream. Jack wanders the corridor, losing himself in the maze of hallways, feet shuffling quiet as a mouse in the hope that he might just stay wandering forever. 

That’s when he sees Cuddy – Jack recognises his curly hair, the tall shape of him barely illuminated in the shadows, the long-fingered hands clutching someone’s shoulders. The person’s face is buried in Cuddy’s neck, and for a moment, Jack doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, wonders if they’re fighting for the way they’re held so tense against each other, but then their angle shifts and their mouths are pressed together in a kiss, and Jack feels his stomach squirm, embarrassed as he was the first time he saw Mindy in her stockings and garters. 

When the other man pulls away, Jack can see that it’s Mal, and he still has his apron on. “Shit,” Mal says. “Cuddy, the kid.”

“Shit,” Cuddy says. He steps away from Mal, and folds his arms close to himself, his usual soft look marred with deeply nervous lines. “Buddy, hey. Are you lost?”

“I was walkin’,” Jack says, and he thinks his ears must be burning; he can feel them hot on the side of his face. “I didn’t mean—”

“You shouldn’t be up here on your own.” Cuddy glances at Mal.

“Cuddy,” Mal says, like a warning.

Cuddy sighs and hunches down, looks at Jack. “You didn’t – you didn't see anything, did ya?”

“No,” Jack says, uncertainly. He wonders if they’ll hit him, same way as his Pa would take him by the scruff of the neck and push him to the wall, tell him to keep his mouth shut about anything he might have seen that he oughtn’t. 

“No,” Mal agrees, pushing Cuddy aside, and he digs in his pocket for a dime which he presses into Jack’s palm. “He didn’t see anything.”

Cuddy sighs. He reaches a hand out towards Jack. Uncertainly, Jack holds out the coin. Cuddy shakes his head. “No, kid. You keep that. Gimme your other hand. You oughta get back to Medda.”

They walk back in the quiet of the summer evening, side by side. Jack feels a strange lump in his throat. It's a tight, guilty feeling - the feeling he's done something wrong, the sense he always carries round with him of waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the storm to hit. But Cuddy doesn't shout, doesn't get mean and ugly in his face or fold his fingers too-tight around Jack's arm. His hand is holding Jack's loosely, like he doesn't mind if Jack pulls away, won't try to stop him if he does. Somehow, it makes Jack feel safer.

And there's something else Jack feels, too, under the uncertainty and wariness; a soft, unnamed yearning, bright and small like a struck matchstick in the dark. 


	3. Chapter 3

If Jack thinks back on it, he must've known his Pa was involved in some bad business. 

It was the kind of business that only took place after dark or in the shadows for a start, in the kind of places no respectable people ever went. Sometimes, Francis would take Jack with him, lugging him around like a bag he didn’t know what do to with, that he resented carrying but could never quite lose. 

He’d leave Jack, when he was irritated and pressed for time, sitting on barstools or crates in a corridor lit with flickering lights, telling him to shut up and stay out of the way. Sometimes the scarred and gnarled-looking doormen took pity on him, this skinny, filthy kid with hair long like a girl’s who sat alone, kicking his heels, and occasionally they’d spend an evening teaching him card games to pass the time. 

Other nights, Frank would take Jack down to Irving Hall instead. With a steely-fingered grip, he’d take Jack across town, past the drugstore and the grocer’s and the bakery, and the shops with fancy hats in the windows where kids as small as Jack hung around with newspapers under their arms, and he’d take Jack to the stage-door entrance, drop him off there like a package, and Moreno would deliver him to Medda. 

Jack knows that what his Pa gets up to isn’t legitimate business. If it were, it wouldn’t take place at night, and he wouldn’t need to leave Jack with Medda and the kinds of girls who have little boys of their own and no husbands. 

On the night of Jack’s ninth birthday, Jack’s sitting at the side of the stage during the show as usual, with Dolly and Sal’s boys in the wings, watching Medda and the girls do a new number with fans, wearing red dresses and white facepaint. He sits and watches, entranced by the plinking, upbeat melodies on Cuddy’s piano, the girls’ sweet voices, the whirl of lights and colours. 

Afterwards, backstage, he gets fussed over as always by the girls as they shimmy out of their skirts and feathers, lipstick half-wiped off as they kiss him on the cheek, plying him with the fancy chocolates that the men in the crowd bring to their dressing-rooms, the candy they always take, even if they don’t always eat it. 

He’s talking to Medda, chatting excitedly as she unpins her hair and lets it tumble red and glossy over her shoulders, but he’s interrupted, suddenly, by a soft hand on his shoulder, and then Mindy is saying quietly in his ear, “I heard it was someone’s birthday,” and she brings out something from behind her back. A small, but very fancy cake with pink icing, one of the finest from Zablocki’s bakery.

A chorus of _happy birthday_ rings out, and Medda strikes a match to light the single candle on top of the cake, pausing for a moment as Mindy lights her cigarette from the flame first before, laughing, she pushes the cake over to Jack. 

Jack stares at it until the flame from the candle makes spots in front of his eyes.

“Well go on,” Medda says. “Make a wish, baby.” 

Jack screws his eyes tight, and blows. The smell of it as the flame snaps out is dark, sharp and immediate. 

Suddenly there’s a banging at the door. Mindy tuts, and Dolly opens it, lips pursed. In the corridor beyond, Francis Sullivan is there. His face is twisted tight, and there’s sweat on his forehead. Medda looks at Jack, frowning, and Jack stands up, uncertain. Even Frank’s best shirt, his only good one, the one without holes in it or yellow stains under the arms, is looking filthy, sticking to skin that looks clammy and sallow in the light, and there’s different stains on it, too – rust-coloured, spots of deep red. 

It’s a hot night, but Jack’s Pa is pale, the colour drained out of him, hands shaking like he has a fever. “We gotta go,” is all he says, when he walks in and reaches out to take Jack by the wrist. 

“Frank, what’s—” Medda says, but Francis doesn’t look at her. 

“Move,” Frank bites out, his steel-grip fingers around Jack unyielding. “We gotta go.”

When Jack starts to make a fuss, kicking his heels and squirming in his Pa’s grip, making noise about the birthday cake he hadn’t gotten to eat, his Pa smacks him round the head, hard enough he feels something crack, and he hears some of the girls screech out in protest. Ignoring them, Frank pushes Jack to walk faster, out and away from the building. Jack doesn’t cry. He’s too angry to cry. He’s so angry, he doesn’t think to look back and say goodbye to Medda, who stands in the doorway watching him leave with her hands pressed over her mouth. 

He wishes, afterwards, that he’d at least remembered to say thank you. 

Francis drags Jack back to their apartment building, cursing every time Jack stumbles or slows, yanking at his arm to get him to move faster and faster. Jack’s shoulder aches, and he begins to feel afraid.

Francis bangs the door to their room open with his shoulder, and then marches to the wardrobe up against the wall, pulling out a battered case without a word. He throws it onto the mattress on the floor and opens it, yanking and tugging at the straps and buckles. There’s nothing inside the case but a cracked hand-mirror that used to belong to Jack’s Ma, and Francis throws it aside and starts bundling some clothes haphazardly inside.

“Pa, what’s—”

“Don’t ask questions, just pack your bag,” Francis snaps. He seems manic, throwing whatever he can find as if he doesn’t even notice what he’s picking up – a knife and fork from the table, a tattered book from the floor, a sheaf of folded papers – on top of his crumpled shirts and moth-eaten coat. “ _Move_ it!”

Jack doesn’t move. Letting out a desperate, angry sound, Francis shoves Jack out of the way and drops to his knees, digging his nails into the floorboards, reaching in to grab a small bundle of bills, stuffing them into his pocket, spilling half of them to the floor and scrabbling to catch them. 

In the empty room, Jack can hear his heart thudding loudly. It’s a steady, stomping noise, heavy and regular like old boots on a stairwell, but when his Pa curses Jack realises the sound is coming from outside. 

“Sullivan!” There’s a banging on the door, and yelping from Miss Belafsky on the floor above who collects the rent demanding to know why she’s been woken by the commotion. Someone tells her to shut up, and there’s a loud bang, and a scream.

“Pa?” Jack says loudly, and he’s trembling. Francis lunges over to him, grabs him by the shoulder and claps a hand over his mouth. 

“Shut up,” Francis hisses. “Stay fuckin' quiet!”

Jack’s heart is racing, his breathing laboured and muffled by his Pa’s fingers clamping over his lips and his jaw, and there’s almost silence for a moment, if it weren’t for the blood ringing in his ears. Then, suddenly, an almighty crash as the door gets kicked in. 

There are three men in the doorway, stood in the gathering dust that resettles on their shoulders, each of them as big and nasty-looking as the next. They’re wearing suits, though the clothes don’t fit right, all of them hulking and brutish in their sagging sleeves. They’ve got clubs swinging in their hands. 

“Get the kid,” one of the men says, his words gravel-low and mashed between yellow-brown teeth that Jack sees in his mouth as his lips curl back in a nasty smile. “We don’t want collateral.” 

Jack’s Pa is covered in sweat, Jack can feel the damp, trembling mass of him behind his back, his Pa’s arms tight around his shoulders, hand still clawed frozen to his jaw. “Don’t,” he says, and Francis Sullivan’s voice is shrunk smaller than Jack’s ever heard it. “Don’t come any closer.”

The men glance at each other. Then one of them shrugs, and steps forward, club raised above his head. 

Jack twists out of his Pa’s grip. He trips and hits the floor with his knees, and the pain shocks him for a second, but then he scrambles to his feet as fast as he can, running directly for the window. He feels fingers scrape his back, hears a shout, but he doesn’t stop to look back. He crawls on his belly, then swings himself down by his arms as he drops down and out the fire escape. 

He runs down the streets, not stopping for horses or carriages or men with their collars turned up against the summer rain that’s begun to fall from the storming, yellow clouds above. He runs past closed and empty shops with shuttered windows, past apartment buildings with lights shining out of cracks behind curtains, past kids curled up in gutters and alleyways with newspapers across their feet. He runs as fast as he can, until his lungs hurt like fire and his legs won’t work anymore. 

And then he stops running, breathing heavy, bile sticky in his throat, in an unfamiliar Manhattan neighbourhood. He swallows, knuckles pressed into his eye sockets as panic and adrenaline and a sick helplessness churns in his belly.

The soft summer rainfall has dried up, gone as quickly as it came, and just like that Jack feels everything drain out of him all at once, seeping out of cracks in his lungs, cheeks tacky with tears he doesn’t remember crying, the effort of standing up knocked out of him like a punch to the gut. He collapses, eyes scrunched shut to stop everything from spinning, and he ends up falling asleep there, curled in the mouth of an alley, alone. 

Somewhere else, further away, Francis Sullivan lies gasping in the dirt outside their apartment. His fingers are broken, his ribs push sharp into aching lungs with every shallow breath, blood seeping a pumping, warm flow from his nose and pulpy, mangled lips, and no one comes to help him, and no one hears him call, and when the bulls show up to take him away, he’s silent.


	4. Chapter 4

Jack finds himself in a constant state of hunger, now, a permanent gnawing in his stomach, like rats eating his insides. He’s afraid, too, but the hunger is often stronger. He sneaks round the back of food stalls, loitering by the splintered, wooden crates piled up outside storefronts, waiting for the shopkeeper to turn his back for just a second to get something to eat. 

He wanders around in the daytime in a confused, blinking haze, like he’s just woken from some claustrophobic nightmare, wary of the openness of the sky and the disinterested thronging of the crowd around him. His eyes feel dry from under his eyelids and all the way back into his skull, too thirsty to cry, like there’s no water left in his body.

He’d gone back, briefly, after that night, back to the old square and the old apartment block, not knowing what to do, but hoping somebody – Miss Belafsky, Tommy and Sid’s Ma on the third floor, maybe even old Mr. Johnson on the bottom floor who never opened his windows and who no one ever saw – would help, would tell him who was going to take care of him now. 

“Did you see?” he hears from across the way, and it’s Tommy and Sid’s Ma, shaking the paper out at one of her friends, another tired-looking lady with hair askew in her bun, hoisting a creaking basket of washed linens under her other arm. “That Francis Sullivan’s been locked up for good.”

The other woman clicks her teeth and shakes her head. “Well he got what he deserves.” 

“And to think he lived a floor above you,” the first woman says, a satisfied sort of sound to her voice. “I always said he was a bad sort.” 

“Never did trust him,” the second woman says, nodding her head in agreement, and then she drops her voice to a hush. “After Clara went… did you see the type of women he would bring around after she was gone? _Dios mio!_ I feel pity for his son.”

“Has anyone found the kid?”

“Still after him, I heard. If you ask me, he’d be better off being put away, too.”

Jack leaves. His old home is abandoned now to fear and to the rats, so he sleeps in stairwells or inside empty storehouses that have doors that don’t shut all the way, cracks just wide enough for a skinny boy of nine to squeeze through. In the dead of night, old nightmares and new ones make him clamp his eyes shut and breathe wetly until the tide of nausea rolls back, but there’s been no one soothing him to sleep since his Ma died anyway, so he does what he’s always done, and he bears it. 

*****

One evening, Jack’s sat on a street corner, head in his hands, dozing a little, hungry and tired, when he’s suddenly jerked from his daze by a collision that knocks him sideways, startling him into banging his head on the sidewalk. 

“Well shit, ya can’t just lie there in the middle of the way!” a voice says.

Jack looks up, curling in on himself slightly, but the boy standing in front of him doesn’t look so mean. He’s tall and gangling, and he’s got his eyebrows raised comically high, a tooth missing at the front of his parted mouth, and matted hair tucked into a cap that’s a dark brown, stained with dust and city grime, but his eyes are curious and kind. “Sorry,” Jack says, and he stands shakily to his feet. 

“Nah, it’s me who’s sorry,” the boy says. He’s got a mellow kind of voice, soft to listen to. “Didn’t mean to kick you while you was down. What ya sittin’ round here for? You waitin’ for someone?”

“No,” Jack says, and his voice is rough and dry. He rubs his eyes. “What are _you_ doin’?”

“Workin’,” the boy says, and he tilts his chin towards the stack of papers hoisted under his arm. “Evenin’ edition of The World, hot off the presses. Gotta shift all this before tonight so’s I can go home. Made a bad call on gettin’ this many – the headline stinks.”

“That – that get you money?”

“Some,” the kid says, shrugging. “It ain’t bad work. Better than bein’ one of them shoeshine boys, ‘least. I did that when I first come to the city. Bein’ a newsie’s hard on your feet, but it ain’t so hard on the knees. Hold on—” He holds a paper out at as a well-dressed man in a lightly sweat-rumpled suit hurries past. “New York World, sir?”

The man halts a second, fishes into his pocket for a penny, and presses it into the boy’s hand, before taking his paper and continuing on his way.

Jack stares after the man’s retreating back. “Can I do that too?” he asks.

“Sure,” the boy says, and his eyes skim over Jack, his unwashed face and tangled hair, longer now than it’s ever been, the holes in his shoes where the toes poke out, and the red flush of warm days and cold nights ruddying his cheeks. “You need to sign on at the distribution centre. What’s your name?” 

Jack tries, for a moment, but finds he can’t answer. His tongue feels thick behind his teeth, like something’s stuck back there, like a sore, painful and infected. 

“Okay,” the boy says, nonplussed. “Well, I’m Fritz. It ain’t what my mother called me, but hardly no-one goes by a real name anyways.” He looks at Jack sympathetically. “Ya need a place to sleep, I’m guessing.” Jack nods. “Well, I gotta shift the rest of my papes or I ain’t getting no dinner, so you’s gonna hafta wait here.”

Jack sits on the sidewalk for a few hours more, uncertain, hovering as he waits for Fritz to finish shouting out his headlines (some of them, Jack notices, as he takes one of the papers to read, aren’t even printed there at all), until his last paper goes to a kind-looking lady in a plain brown dress who presses a quarter into Fritz’s hand with a smile. 

“Alright,” Fritz crows. “You musta brought me luck, kid – all my papes sold, and with a bad headline, too!” He claps Jack on the shoulder. “Come on, I’ll take ya to the Lodge. Kloppman’ll let you in for the night, even if you ain’t got nothin’ to pay with – you’ll owe your next day’s pay to him. He’s good that way, Kloppman.”

“What’s the Lodge?” Jack’s so tired now, blinking sunspots that don’t come out of his eyes, and his stomach is tied in knots from hunger. 

Fritz holds out a hand to help him up. “S’where all the newsies go.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Seven out!” Racetrack yells, and he flings his arms wide as the boys jostling around him holler and stamp their feet. They crowd in closer, scrabbling in the gravel to pick up their matchsticks, as Race reaches out to grab a large, flat stone. He flips it over to where a black cross has been scratched on the back with the burnt tip of a match. “Alright, place ya bets!”

Race is a loudmouth kid who has the kind of voice that carries up and above the noise of a crowd, above his own head, too, being as he is so short for his age. It’s a good trait for calling on bets when the boys are killing time playing craps. It’s good for selling papers too, in a city as loud as New York.

Jack leans forward. He’s got a fat stack of matches in hand, and he places two of them down. Someone whistles. Jack pauses for a second, and then, smirking, puts two more matches just behind those ones. The boys around him crow and whoop, and there’s a flurry of activity as the rest of them all start putting down matchsticks of their own.

“Come out,” Race calls, shoving a handful of chipped dice in Jack’s direction. “Cowboy’s shootin’!”

Cowboy – that’s the name Jack uses now. None of the boys round here go by their real names, just like Fritz had told him a few years back, when they’d met by chance that day on the sidewalk. Some of them pick their own names, others get given them. Jack, for his part, lifts his name from the pages of a tatty paperback book his Ma used to read him; a dime novel with a picture of a red road and an orange sunset on the front, about a cowboy, name of Jack Kelly, and his adventures out West. 

Jack doesn’t have regrets. He’s too busy, now. He spends the day hawking headlines, fingers black with print, nose running in the cold mornings or scorched in the hot summer sun, feet always sore from tracking up and down the sidewalk. It’s hard work, but most days it gets him food in his belly and a place to sleep at night. His bed at the Lodging House is nothing fancy, but it’s good enough, beats sleeping in an open stairwell outside any time, and he doesn’t even mind the snoring and the scuffles and the stink of too many boys with dirty hands and feet lying side by side; when he’s surrounded by them, these kids just like him without names or families, he feels less alone. 

“Go on, Cowboy!” someone calls now, and the boys start to chant, “Roll ‘em, roll ‘em, roll ‘em!”

“Alright, alright, don’t rush me!” Jack laughs, shoving wayward elbows away from him as they crowd around to look. Someone starts a drumroll by slapping against their thighs, and Jack smirks, holding the dice as he blows into his fist, and rattles them about in his cupped palm a few times for good measure, before tossing the dice hard against the uneven ground. 

“Got us a four, boys!” Race shouts over the commotion, and he reaches to flip the flat stone back over. “Play the point, Kelly’s up! Roll ‘em!” 

Jack rolls his dice again, landing on double sixes as someone yells, “Box cars!”

“Got us a hot table, boys!”

“Roll ‘em bones again, Cowboy!”

Grinning, Jack picks up the dice, gives them a loud, smacking kiss and rolls again. They clack on the ground, bumping over dirt and gravel, finally landing on a two and another two. 

“Four!” Race calls. “That’s a pass, everybody! Getcha winnings, getcha winnings!”

“Hey, hey, hey,” someone shouts. “Outta the damn way!” There’s the clattering of hooves and the crunch of heavy wheels on the dirt road as the cart with the stacks of the morning edition of The World comes into the distribution centre where the boys are gathered. “World employees, get in line!”

With a few gripes and grumbles the matchsticks get collected, and Race picks up his dice. “Not bad, Cowboy,” he says. “You’s on a lucky streak today.”

“Yeah, if only I was gettin’ more’n matchsticks for it,” Jack says, as he pockets a stack. They don’t count for anything, but Jack would be a rich man if they did.

“Maybe one day they’ll start turnin’ matchsticks into money, you can cash ‘em in.” Race shoves Jack with his shoulder as the circulation bell rings and they get in line. “Hot-shot like you’d be king o’ New York, we’d all hafta follow you round, like the Mayor.”

Jack shoves back. “Stop talkin’ horseshit, Racetrack, and get ya papes.”

“Yes, your highness.”

They line up, a horde of them, a rumpled and ragged crew, kicking their heels and twitchy with anticipation as the headline goes up on a chalkboard above them. 

“How’s it lookin’ today?” Race asks, peering over Jack’s shoulder.

The headline this morning is piss-poor: _Revised Telephone Rates Implemented Imminently_. Jack slides his money down and asks for a hundred papes anyway. He’s feeling lucky.

*****

Jack’s gone across the river, one afternoon, down to Brooklyn.

There are days he likes wandering out that way, where the roads are less familiar. Some days, the Manhattan neighbourhood he knows so well makes him feel like a king, the roads and back alleys a sprawling labyrinth he can navigate like the back of his hand. Other days, the familiarity is stifling, a reminder at every corner of things he’d rather forget, ghosts inside the walls and under the cobblestones, following him. On those days, Jack just walks, and keeps walking, going places where the memories don’t run so deep, where there’s a little more space to breathe.

He’s minding his own business on the pier overlooking the East River, watching the boats out on the water in the fading light as the evening comes in. The rag-tag gaggle of boys gathered among the beams and railings are mostly Irish, he can tell, tight-knit and prone to picking fights if they feel crossed, so Jack keeps out of their way and stares out at the stretched-out blueness of the river instead.

And then he feels something skim past him, so close it whispers against the skin of his ear, sharp and quick and landing with a loud crack somewhere behind him. Instinctively, he ducks. Then he hears laughter. 

Jack raises his head. The gang of boys down the bridge a little way are all looking at him and laughing, and the one laughing loudest is the smallest, stood at the front with his cap stuck at an angle. He grins, and holds up a slingshot, one eye squinted shut as he pulls the empty strap back and aims it at Jack. 

“Close call,” the kid says. 

Jack looks behind his head, where there’s a small indentation in the wood. “Try’na assassinate me?”

The kid crows. “ _Assassinate?_ Ain’t you the innellectual.” He grins wider, eyes pale. “I ain’t try’na kill ya. But I coulda had your eye out.”

Jack stands up. The kid seems about his age, twelve or thirteen, but he’s a runt. Jack’s bigger than him by a head at least. “Well. You missed,” he says.

The kid narrows his gaze with a twisted kind of smirk, the kind Jack sometimes sees in the faces of the nastier kids at the Lodge who get a kick out of giving the little ones a scare. “I don’t never miss what I’m aimin’ at.”

“You were aimin’ at the fish in the river, then?”

The kid doesn’t respond, just pushes his cap up off where it’s falling across his eye, smirk still in place, sharp-edged as a knife. “You ain’t from round here,” he says. “What’s your name?”

“Jack Kelly. They call me Cowboy. What do they call you?”

“Spot Conlon. And a few other things besides, including the one you gotta answer to if you’s thinking of stickin’ around.”

Jack looks the kid over. Spot Conlon is a scrap of a boy in a cap too big for him, with pale green eyes and a turned-up button-like nose. He seems like the kind of kid ladies might feel sorry for, and give an extra quarter to, if he weren’t so ratty and mean-looking. “I ain’t stickin’ around,” he says.

“That right?” Spot says, and he tosses his slingshot from one hand to another, catching it deftly and then aiming it, loaded with a small round pebble, at Jack’s face. “So, ya reckon you’re a better shot than me, _Cowboy?_ ”

Jack looks back at Spot through the curve of the slingshot, right into the eye he’s got open and fixed on Jack. “With that lousy aim,” Jack says, “I reckon so.”

Spot lowers his arm, and bares his teeth, like a mangy cat with its hackles raised. He’s so skinny, starved-looking, he shouldn’t be much to look at – but there’s something in the way he stands like he owns the whole bridge they stand on, hip cocked and jaw set, lackeys crowded behind him even though half of them are heads and shoulders taller than he is. They bristle, waiting, mean and cagey looks on their faces. 

Jack straightens, tense, but Spot makes a clicking sound against his teeth, lip still curled in disdain, like he’s decided it isn’t worth his time. “I’d like to see ya prove it sometime,” is all he says to Jack, and then he sticks the slingshot in his belt and whistles high and sharp, waving imperious to the group of boys to follow him, like some kind of king, into the retreating evening.

*****

Two days later, Jack runs into Spot again.

It’s raining – that’s one of the things he’ll remember the most clearly, afterwards. The sound of the rain on shuttered windows, the mud splashed high on the back of the dusty pants of hunch-shouldered men packing up stalls and carts, the cold feel of it dripping down his collar. The crawling damp of it in his shoes and socks. 

He’s lost, a bit, unfamiliar with the intersecting roads of this Brooklyn neighbourhood, not remembering if he’s walked past this particular tailor’s before, so he ends up in a tangle of backalleys and throughways, hovering, uncertain, cold. 

And then hears what sounds like a muffled shout, the sound of something knocked over, a clattering loud enough that it cuts through the deadening noise of the constant rain, and over the endless sound of a city at work, even in this weather. He pauses, moves to his right, and glances into a side-street, narrow and hard to notice if he hadn’t stopped so close to it. 

He notices the cap knocked to the floor first, nearest to his feet. And then he sees the kid in the alleyway, blond hair pasted wetly to his forehead, and the slow-moving rivulets off water off the arms and elbows of the man with his fingers around Spot Conlon’s throat.

Jack stands dead still. He’s at the mouth of the alley, a few feet only away from the struggle, but he can’t make sense of the distance in the haze of rain. Everything’s drowned in static. There’s no shouting, no cursing. He thinks Spot is crying but he can’t hear so he doesn’t know. He can see Spot’s fingers scrabble and slip in muddled desperation at the hand going all the way round his skinny neck, arching and craning away from the hulking figure that crowds him. The man is silent but his heaving breath on the kid’s face is much too close, and shifts the soggy tendrils of his hair. 

Jack doesn’t remember the stone, large and heavy and rough, a broken slab from the uneven paving at his feet, leaving his hand. But he sees the man go down, sees him fall heavily backwards without a sound, landing on the ground like a soggy sack of old meat, sticky-wet blood mixing with the stagnant puddle-water collecting in the cracks. 

All Jack can hear is the trickling of rainwater and his own breath. He looks at Spot. Spot looks back at him, but his eyes are glazed, like he’s not really seeing him at all. He touches his own neck, at the tight ring of red-raw skin there. 

There’s a sick taste in Jack’s mouth. 

“Good shot, Cowboy,” Spot says, and he sounds so far away. “Proved your aim after all.” He laughs, tremblingly, but he’s sheet-white and shaking.

Jack steps forward, and stops. Then he takes another step. Then one more. He leans down and squeezes around the fallen man’s wrist. Then he stands up quick. There’s a heartbeat, he thinks.

“Who was – who is he?” 

Spot is staring down at the man’s motionless body. “My Pa,” he says and his voice is thin as a whisper. “Dunno how he found me. He’s been missin’ since he – when my Ma disappeared. Since he – when he—” Spot stops. He pushes a balled-up fist to his mouth, biting his knuckles.

“I coulda killed him,” Jack says. There’s silence, and rain. 

“I wouldn’a stopped you,” Spot says suddenly, viciously. “I wouldn’t.”

“We should go,” Jack says. “Before someone comes lookin’.” 

There’s a prickling feeling scuttling like bugs inside him, memories itching his skin all over, of men in suits too big for them, of his Pa’s breath on the back of his neck – or maybe it’s just the blood creeping slowly back to normal into his arms and legs. But in the pit of his stomach, or in the hollows of his heart, or somewhere else inside that’s deep and impossible to point to, there’s a hot, fierce feeling, too, that feels like taking something back that had been taken away from him, something that belonged to him in the first place. 

“Cowboy,” Spot says, haltingly. He’s got a trickle of blood seeping a pinkish tinge into his rain-wet collar from a cut on his lip, and he’s pale, translucent almost, like he’s made out of the dirty city mist, all white and grey. But he’s got something of a hardness in the jut of his jaw, and with determination in his face he hocks a wad of spit into his hand, and extends his palm. Jack spits too, puts his own hand out, and they shake on it, a bond formed there in the cold rain, over the ghost of something put to rest.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's nothing graphic, but jack does get arrested and sent to the refuge in this chapter, so warning for child abuse. i promise things'll get better for this boy.

Jack’s walking across town late afternoon, stretching his aching arms. Keeping the stack of papers hoisted under his bent elbow all day has given him a permanent crick, and he tries to massage the feeling away, leaving grubby ink-marks up and down his inner arm. He’s blissfully done with his round today, the fair, sunny weather making the trek across his usual beat not so much of a chore, even though there’s a cool bite to the September air. He thinks about heading back to the Lodge, see if any of the boys there fancy a game of cards, when something runs straight into him. 

It’s a boy, looks like, pale under dark hair, with wide blue eyes darting and frantic. He grips Jack’s arm for a second, then looks behind him and hisses, _“Run!”_ before disappearing off quick as he appeared. Jack turns in time to see two cops jogging towards them fast, now heading in his direction. Confusion and panic paralyses him for a second before instinct wins out and he turns and runs too. 

He catches up with the boy, who grabs at Jack, shouting, “Go, go, go!” and pushes him down a sideroad. They stumble in, and he shoves at Jack’s shoulder so that Jack bends his knees, crouching behind a stack of fruit crates piled high enough that it blocks the two of them from sight. The smell is cloying, oversweet and laced with the sour scent of stagnant garbage, and Jack’s gagging in his throat but the sound goes nowhere because the boy clamps his hand across Jack’s mouth. 

When the sound of shouting and footsteps fades, the bulls gone out of sight, lost in the commotion of the city, the boy peels his hand away and blows out a noisy exhale. 

“Close call,” he says, and his voice is breathless, maybe on account of his running, but the main thing Jack notices is he doesn’t seem all that frightened. “What’s the bulls chasin’ ya for?” 

“I – I wasn’t—” Jack stutters, confused. His heart’s still beating like a swollen drum in his ribs. “I ain’t bein’ chased. They was after _you_.”

The kid grins, a twitch of his lips to the side. “You sure run fast for someone who ain’t bein’ chased.”

Jack scowls. “Ain’t no point givin’ ‘em a reason to come lookin’. The bulls’ll find somethin’ on you, even if you ain’t really done nothin’.” It’s what his Pa used to say. _No good ever comes of them askin’ too many questions. They’ll lock you up soon as look at you, so if you see ‘em, you run._ Jack eyes over the boy, his smudged, dirty face and the holes in his shirt. “I’m guessin’ you know somethin’ about that.”

“I know somethin’ about that,” the boy agrees, shrugging. He puts his hand out. “I’m Kit. Nice to meet ya.”

“Jack.” Jack shakes Kit’s hand. He can see the bones of the boy's wrist moving, sharp protrusions under skin the colour of sallow milk. He has frayed-looking black hair and pale blue eyes in a sharp-angled face. His gaze is oddly fixed, unblinking like a lizard, with long eyelashes like a girl’s. He hasn't let go of Jack's hand. “If you’re runnin’, you must be hidin’ somethin’.”

Kit’s grip goes from soft to vicious in a split-second, and Jack suddenly finds himself hauled forward, arm trapped between Kit’s bent elbow and waist, a knife at his neck. 

“I’m hidin’ all sorts,” Kit says, sharp. “And I knows how to deal with people too nosy for they own good.” Jack’s heart is in his throat, fluttering against the edge of the knife, and he thinks he stops breathing. Then Kit laughs and lets Jack go. Jack stumbles hard back into the wall, fingers flying to his neck to touch the skin there. “Don’t worry,” Kit says, and he opens his palm to show Jack the knife, then tucks it back into his belt in one swift movement. “It ain’t for you. You seem nice.” 

“You don’t so much,” Jack says, and his heart’s still beating fast. “Attackin’ innocent people in alleyways like that.” There’s something about the way Kit’s looking at Jack that makes him feel like he’s stood on a bridge in the wind, ground flexing unsteadily under his feet, swaying even as he stands still. 

The boy cocks his head, and says, “Well then. Maybe I’ll do this instead.”

Jack’s eyes are wide open so he sees the pock-marked scarring on Kit’s skin up close as the boy leans in and kisses him. One hand goes to the side of Jack’s face, and the other holds onto his hip. For a second Jack just stands there dumbly, feeling the soft, dry press of cracked lips against his, but then he’s reeling back and bringing a fist up and he catches Kit on the bottom of the jaw and he doesn’t know if it was an accident or not. 

They stand for a second in silence – Jack with his fists clenched, not sure if the spinning, burning feeling in the pit of his stomach is anger or shock or something else, and Kit with a suddenly stricken look on his face – and then the boy turns and runs off, down the alleyway and out without another word. 

Alone in the alleyway, still surrounded by the smell of rotting fruit, heart beating, Jack touches his own mouth, and then his hip, where Kit’s hand had been a moment ago. He thinks maybe if he’d had a wallet in his pocket, it would’ve been long gone by now, but Jack’s pockets are always empty, so he wonders what the whole thing was for. 

Back at the Lodge later on, when the boys ask him where he’s been hiding, Jack tells them to mind their own business. A couple of them jump on him, teasing, trying to get him to talk, and Jack grabs their wayward, scrabbling hands and yanks their arms behind their backs, and one of them gets him into a headlock and he bangs his fist in the dust for mercy. When they let go Jack laughs, probing at the bruises starting to form on his neck. 

He puts the boy in the alleyway and his soft, gentle touch out of his mind.

*****

Jack was already having a bad day when everything went to hell.

The weather had stunk and the headlines were worse, and he hadn’t eaten all day for all the time he’d spent trudging the streets in raging winds and skin-chilling rain, so he’d not thought twice about slipping under the awning by the baker’s and filling his pockets. The way Jack saw it, if fortune was dead set against him losing a day’s pay, then he was going to take back what he was owed. 

But the baker surprises him by shouting, _“Thief!”_ and chasing Jack faster than he was expecting down the street, and Jack finds the cops already there at the other end, nastier somehow on account of the bad weather outside, turning out his pockets roughly and pushing him to his knees in the dirt. He spends a night in a cell, shocked and reeling at how fast it all happened, and they haul him to the courthouse the next day with bruise-marks on his arms. 

The judge there has a round, red face and a thick moustache like a hedge under his nose, oiled and bristling. He looks over Jack, vacant and placid as he bangs the gavel on the bench. “Three months in the House of Refuge,” he calls, in a droning voice. “So ordered.”

When they take him there, Jack doesn’t think the name _Refuge_ is right for a place that’s got bars on the windows and rats scuttling about the floor, and the dusty, clammy smell of dirt and fear in the air. It makes him sick, the smell of it, and it makes him afraid. 

The warden at the House of Refuge is a pouchy-faced man called Snyder, too-soft and dangerously delicate in his tones and bad in a way that makes Jack’s skin shrink back – bad in a way he can feel right through to his bones. Snyder watches them, prowling back and forth down the aisles that separate the cots the boys sleep in, a horse crop flexed between his fingers.

The first time Jack gets a beating from the warden’s whip, he sees it coming. He’s had years of watching his Pa stalk around with a tight, mean look on his face, anticipating when the next blow would come, steeling himself for it when it did. 

Jack knows what it means when Snyder stops still, his eyes narrowed and his fingers flexed at the edge of his plate, piled high with buttery potatoes and sausages, before he says, _“What_ did you say to me?”

“Any of that for us?” Jack says again, his heart hammering, but he’s too angry to care, too stupid with the thrill of adrenaline, and dizzy with hunger. “Seems like you got plenty, and I don’t think any of us seen a scrap of food for two days.” 

“You are here to bring me my plate.” Snyder gets to his feet. “In silence.” He steps towards Jack. “To learn the meaning of discipline and obedience. Clearly, this is a lesson you have failed to learn.”

“What about stealin’? That a lesson here, too? Stealin’ food from starvin’ kids?”

The pain of the lashing is white-hot across the back of his thighs, but there’s an icy humiliation too, that starts in the pit of Jack’s stomach and leeches outwards like cold water in his veins instead of blood. “You will _not_ speak to me that way,” the warden says quietly, his voice never rising, and he presses his fingers too gently into the welts he’s left behind. 

And still Jack can’t stop himself. Rage, injustice and frustration calcifies like a rock in his stomach. When he gets thrown into a pitch-dark holding cell by another guard for _misbehaving_ again, Jack rails against the bars, kicking and shouting until Snyder himself comes back down with a sigh, rolling his sleeves up, before holding Jack against the wall with all the weight behind his corpulent body, using his whip again in a merciless lashing, smoothing a hand over the marks afterwards, a touch that’s worse, almost, than the pain of the beating. 

Late in the night, Jack lays on the ground, very still, his whole face wet, breathing in-out, in-out, very fast, gripped by old fears he’d forgotten, of loneliness, and hunger, and the shape of an empty room in the dark.

*****

Jack wouldn't have called himself particularly smart, or said he was especially brave. He wasn't the type to make grand plans, either. His whole life so far had just been a tumble in and out the stream of whatever spectacularly bad or good luck was pushing him about, rough and unpredictable and out of his control.

It was the same dumb luck his Pa used to have, once upon a time, wriggling out of straits and scrapes and tight corners at the last minute. Jack had heard it said about Francis Sullivan a few times; how he was slippery as an eel and just as hard to catch. And then the good luck ran out, and the bad luck knocked his feet right out from under him.

Jack's had a run of bad luck, these past months. He figures he's owed a little good.

One night, Teddy Roosevelt, the New York governor of all people, visits the Refuge to cast an eye over its washed-up veneer. Jack figures the man must be stupid as all hell or as corrupted as the rest of the city fat cats if he can’t see the cracks where all the lost boys have fallen, ignoring what’s right in front of his eyes to line Snyder’s pockets a little deeper.

His shortsightedness, it turns out, is just the lucky break Jack needs.

He slips from the building and slinks out into the shadows when no one's looking, too busy with the mayor, the warden occupied with his wine. The big iron gates at the end of the courtyard are locked tight – Jack can see that from here, and he knows there’s no climbing over without making a lot of noise or being seen. But then he spots it, halfway up the pathway to the Refuge front entrance; a dark, gleaming carriage, slick and shiny-looking under the moonlit sky. 

Nobody sees a small, skinny kid skulking in the dark, following the walls, then rolling to crawl on his belly, quiet as a mouse, towards Roosevelt’s carriage. Quickly, silently, he squeezes underneath, between the wheels. 

The horses whicker softly, pawing the ground with their hooves.

It’s a few hours later when Jack hears footsteps. His limbs feel numb and cramped and his stomach is a churning broil of nerves and anticipation and he's bitten the skin of his thumb to the bloody quick of his nailbed. When he sees the Governor’s shiny shoes stepping on the pathway, Jack scrambles up with a burst of nauseated excitement, hoisting himself up into the undercarriage, arms tense as he holds himself in place above the ground. 

As the wheels start to clatter and turn, the horses’ hooves clopping sharply on the stone path down from the Refuge, Jack feels his muscles start to shake from the effort. He’s weak. Tired and underfed, sweat beads on his forehead, and his fingers are dangerously close to the sharp wheel spokes that start turning faster as the carriage rolls out and down towards the gates. 

And then the carriage passes the gate, passes the guards, away from the building, away from the warden, and it clatters out onto the road. 

As soon as the carriage turns out of sight of the Refuge, Jack collapses to the ground, bringing his arms and legs into a tight ball, head bowed to the ground, waiting for the carriage to pass over his head, hardly daring to breathe in case someone looks back and notices the strange cargo dropped off in the middle of the cobbled road. 

After a minute or two, the sound of wheels and hooves dies away. Jack stands up, and retches the scant contents of his stomach into the gutter, before wiping his mouth and walking down the road, shaky and a little dazed, like he’s moving slow through water or through the thick miasma of a strange dream, towards the Lodge.


	7. Chapter 7

The gossip about Jack’s stunning jailbreak spreads like only gossip does; wildfire-quick, and with the same permanence. Soon, there’s not a kid amongst the newsies who doesn’t know the story, but over the months and years the layers of it get more and more mixed up with each retelling until it’s like one of the headlines they’re always trying to sell; sensational, awe-inspiring, and not really the whole truth at all.

Jack likes the stories. The bravado they paint him with papers over the cracks and the fear that lingers with a grimy insistency in the back of his head.

It’s like a sickness you can’t stop coming up your throat even as you try to swallow it down. Jack’s still afraid, at inconvenient and uncomfortable times, without reason or pattern. He’s afraid of the sound of boots on stairs, the memory of the warden’s whip or his Pa’s fists – he’s even afraid thinking of his Ma, sometimes, of the stillness of her face and the coldness of her body that morning. It takes hold, and he still can’t shake it. All he can do is hide it.

He’s out on the sidewalk one evening, just by the Lodge, sitting cross-legged in the dust as he plays a game of cards with Racetrack.

“What’s got ya so jumpy, Cowboy?” Race says, licking the edge of a fingertip as he deals out the cards. “Ya look like a spooked horse.”

With effort, Jack stops himself from throwing another glance behind him at what he swore was the sound of a police whistle, high and shrill, but turns out was just a dumb bird, squawking on the wind. With a shrug, he picks his cards up and fans them out. “Whaddaya mean, ‘jumpy’? You’s imaginin’ things, as usual.”

Race raises a dark eyebrow. “Never had much of a poker face, Kelly.”

Jack looks over the bad hand he’s been dealt in silence, fanning out the cards. “I was just thinkin’,” he says, after a moment. “You ever wanna just – leave? Get out? Go someplace else?”

“Someplace else?” Race frowns. “Like Brooklyn?”

“Farther.”

“Outside a’ New York?”

“Yeah. Outside a’ New York.”

Race puts his cards face-down, and reaches in his pocket for a cigarette, rolled already, bent in the middle and skinny as a toothpick, using his tobacco in dregs, saving it up. “Never really wanted to go nowhere else.”

Jack strikes a match and Race leans forward. Jack lights his cigarette for him, then blows the match out. “You ever seen Santa Fe?”

“No. Why, you plannin’ on takin’ me there, Kelly? Little vacation sometime?”

“Just thinkin’ out loud, is all.”

“What’s Santa Fe got that New York ain’t?” Race gestures out, hand spread upwards, to the buildings stacked up against the horizon, to the grimy aftermath of yesterday’s rain staining grey rivulets on every wall and surface.

Jack shrugs. “More space. A bigger sky. I seen pictures. Looks like it’d be warm, too.”

Race shrugs back. “Sky don’t look much different one place or another, it’s still the same thing above your head. New York’s home, ain’t it? Always has been, always will.”

“You don’t want nothin’ more?”

Race stubs out his half-smoked cigarette and sticks it behind his ear. “What else is there?” He picks his cards back up. “Your move, Kelly.”

*

On the night of his sixteenth birthday, Jack finds himself outside Medda’s. 

He’s blinking up at the bright lights like he sleepwalked there and just woke up. For all he knows, he might have done. 

He feels like he’s in a dream. As the years have gone by, his memories of the time he spent at Irving Hall have faded to something soft and imprecise; an impression of feelings, sights and sounds like a smudged drawing losing its details. 

Yet amongst it, there’s something that sticks out like broken glass, a memory that’s sore and tender that he can’t smooth over, even after seven years – a summer storm brewing, a birthday candle just blown out, and Medda standing by the door, hands pressed over her mouth. It’s jarring, how the memory comes back, gnawing at him like this. It was a lifetime ago. The kid who used to wait in the wings, whose whole life spun on a tumultuous carousel of uncertainty and loss, is a kid Jack doesn’t know any more. 

The theatre’s changed a lot. Jack’s seen the extensions that were added two or three years ago, the way the roof’s been redone, the paintjob they did over it when the deeds to the place changed hands, and he’s seen the endless rotation of posters on the walls whenever he walks past the place, unavoidable on his daily selling track. But the way the theatre lights up at night on the inside, the way the red velvet curtains fall at the side of the stage, the jewels and feathers and spilled rouge powder on cluttered dressers, that’s something Jack’s only seen in his dusty memories, these last seven years. 

He doesn’t even know if the girls – Dolly and Daisy and Sal and Val and Mindy – are still there, or if new girls have taken their place. Back then, they were all on the posters, a row of girls dressed identical, blondes and brunettes, dark skin and light skin, but only Medda had that bright red hair Jack remembers seeing like a fiery halo glowing round her head the first time he met her in her doorway. 

Now Jack stands in front of a gigantic, lit-up cardboard cut-out, hung right on the front of the theatre, and he’s looking straight into Medda’s painted face, under the fancy lettering spelling out: _Medda Larkson, the Swedish meadowlark, star of the New York stage._

Jack turns away, and walks down by the side of the theatre, round to a back door he knows is there. It’s cold under his palm, and it’s dark enough back here he can hardly see the shape of his own hand. Jack feels a tide of memory hit him all at once, sight and sound and touch under his skin and inside his head – sitting back here, not waiting for his Pa, but hiding from him, hoping he’d find a secret hole to slip into, hoping he’d never be found and he could live in this building forever. 

Nausea rolls over him, a sickness in his stomach and exhaustion from the day; hunger, too, from having eaten nothing at all, and Jack feels dizzy and lightheaded, his breathing coming fast and shallow, and he presses his nose to the stone wall, eyes closed against the sudden pain. 

And then there’s a gust of air as the door opens to his left, and light spills out from it, bright and blotchy against his eyelids. 

Jack opens his eyes. Silhouetted against the door is a woman with red hair in a pink dress that goes to the floor. She’s holding a cigarette in one hand – Jack can see her pink nails in the glow – and is shaking out a brightly-patterned kaftan with the other. She pauses and peers out. “Is that you, Bill?”

“Medda.” Jack’s voice cracks. He steps into the light and flinches under it, like the beam of it is there to expose him, flay the skin from him. 

There’s a sharp intake of breath, then a soft voice that says, “Where you been, kid?”

**  
**

*

**  
**

Later, Jack will mostly remember the oatmeal. It’s the first proper hot food he’s had for days, and it’s so good, so thick and sweet and filling that he’s scared he’s going to throw it up. He eats it in small spoonfuls, slow as he can, swallowing past the lump in his throat. 

Medda’s watching him eat. She’s changed into a lavender gown, and she still smells of flowers and her skin is still powder-soft. None of the other girls are here. Medda’s got her own dressing room now, a commode in the corner festooned with feathers and jewels that catch the light and scatter bright shapes on the walls – and there are flowers everywhere, and boxes filled with crinkled paper, trailing ribbons to the floor. Gifts from admirers. Jack knows the type. 

Medda’s silent. When Jack finishes eating, she takes his bowl away, then leans back, arms folded. “It’s been a long time, kid,” she says, eventually. 

Jack doesn’t realise he’s crying until he brushes the hair out of his eyes and his fingers come away wet. He wipes his nose on the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, then immediately feels ashamed, but Medda isn’t looking at him. She’s looking out of a window, fingers tapping her cigarette, lost somewhere, Jack supposes, in the memories of a long time ago. 

“I read about it in the papers,” Medda says after a moment. “Your Pa. They came here, those men, they came looking for him, and I didn’t know if they’d come after you, too. You were just a kid, but your father, he was mixed up in some real bad business.” She presses her lips together. “I figured maybe you’d run off. I didn’t blame you.” She shrugs, slipping another cigarette out of a fancy silver case. “But I worried about you, kid. Made myself sick with worrying.”

Jack hunches into the blanket, hiding half his face. “Those men,” he says, haltingly. “They – followed us home. They took him, down to the street. Beat him real bad, I heard, but I didn’t stick around to look. I just ran fast as I could. Didn’t know what else to do.” Jack swallows. “I wanted to get away from all that. But ya know what?” Jack laughs a bit, cracked and creaking. “Still got myself in trouble, Medda. Landed in jail a couple years back. Followed in the old man’s footsteps anyway.” 

“Oh, kid.”

Jack scrubs a hand over his face, sticky with tears and sugar-sweet oatmeal. “It’s alright. I ain’t in trouble right now. You’s lookin’ at a respectable employee of Joseph Pulitzer, these days. I got some money, and a place to stay, so you could say I’s doin’ alright.” He looks at Medda, and she’s watching him close. “Sorry I never came back sooner.” 

“You don’t gotta be sorry for a thing,” Medda says. “But I’m glad to know you’re alright.” She leans forward, then seems to stop herself, and leans back, hesitant. “Won’t you – won’t you come here, baby?” 

And Jack goes to her, and she holds him tight enough to squeeze the air out of him, her long-nailed fingers soft on his head at the back where his hair’s grown long. 

“Missed ya, Medda,” Jack says, voice rough. 

“I missed you too,” she says as she lets him go. She holds him out at arm’s length, looking him over for a moment. “It’s good to see that face again. You look so much like your— like you used to.” 

Jack hears it, hears what she meant, and it squeezes at his chest for a moment before he pushes it back, back to where he leaves the rest of the old memories to fester, things he won’t pick up and look at anymore, not if he can help it. “I ain’t – that’s all done with, Medda. The old man’s got nothin’ to do with me no more. My name’s Jack, now. Jack Kelly. That’s what everyone calls me.”

Medda’s stood up, back turned, and Jack can see the downward slope of her shoulders, the weight that’s there, but when she turns back to him, her face is light and pretty as he ever remembered. “You’ll always be _kid_ to me, honey, no matter what you go ‘round calling yourself,” she says. “But it’s nice to meet you anyhow, Jack Kelly. I hope you’ll be coming back to see me again sometime.”

Jack stays the night in Medda’s quarters, curled up on a chaise longue that’s black and gold velvet and draped with costume pieces and even though he’s got feathers tickling his nose and strings of pearls digging into his back he sleeps easy as he ever did when he was here, eight years old and lulled to rest by the tinkling laughs of Medda and the girls. 

And this time, in the morning, before he leaves, he remembers to say thank you.


	8. Chapter 8

The summer Jack meets David Jacobs is the summer of his seventeenth year. 

It’s an innocuous morning outside the distribution office in July. Everyone’s gathered up, as usual, waiting for Weisel to open the gates so they can get their morning papers, but there’s something unfamiliar in the crowd that makes Jack pause, for just a moment – an unusually neat-pressed boy, wearing a smart shirt, buttoned to the top, slacks hanging straight and uncreased despite the heat. He’s got tight brown curls under a neat, clean cap, and bright blue eyes, and his hand is placed warningly on the shoulder of a younger kid next to him. 

He’s in line for his papers like everyone else, but unlike the rest of the rabble, he has the clean, healthy look of someone who eats regular meals and sleeps in a real bed, white skin that seems like it’s hardly seen the sun, and gives off the soft impression of someone well cared-for, and loved. It makes him stand out like a sore thumb.

When he gets to the front of the line, and Weasel tries to weasel the boy out of the full twenty papes he paid for, a stack of nineteen dropped dismissively on the distribution counter, the kid clears his throat politely, thumbing through his papers with a hapless sort of presumption like he believes in honest mistakes and has never been told a lie in his life. 

It makes Jack’s skin itch, watching the whole exchange. He feels the inexplicable need to do something about it. 

The younger kid of the two introduces himself as Les; a bright little thing with the kind of cute mug that looks like it’d tug on heart-strings and purse-strings alike. The other kid, David – _he’s older_ , Les tells Jack, straight-faced – has the same nose and innocently-pursed mouth as his brother, but a hard line to his whole body like he’s propped up entirely by suspicion when Jack approaches. 

Both of them are clean-cut in their well-tended clothes, but Jack notices the worn threads at the elbows of their shirts, the different buttons that don’t match, even though they’re sewn on with care. David has a pocketwatch, old and silver and weighty that he keeps checking, but the pocket he slips it back into is discolored, like it had been taken from an entirely different shirt to patch up this one. 

There's no reason to find them interesting, either of them. For some reason, Jack does.

They're fish-out-of-water, as far as Jack's concerned, and Jack has talent and expertise to spare. They exchange short words, a deal struck for Jack to show them the ropes, negotiating a fair split of the profits, but there’s a charge behind everything coming from the new kid’s mouth – something challenging, picking at the seams of Jack’s bravado with a determination to get underneath the skin, and all within half an hour of meeting each other. It's irritating, no doubt, but there's a prickle of something that feels thrilling, somehow; and Jack thought he was happy with the staid and steady rhythm of his days, predictable from the rapping of Kloppman’s knuckles against his bedpost to the ringing of the distribution bell every morning, free of danger and uncertainty, but he suddenly finds that right now, more than anything, he wants the excitement of something new. 

When they shake on it, it’s David’s eyes that Jack notices most of all, and the bright blue of them, like the sea.

*****

By the time sunset comes around, Les is a dead weight in Jack’s arms.

They’d been working hard all day, morning and evening editions sold tirelessly, and they hadn’t done half bad from it, their pockets jangling and full.

Jack had pulled out every trick in the book, every sales pitch and technique he knew. He’d maybe showed off a bit too - an exercise in ego only encouraged by the half-impressed, half-exasperated quirk of David’s eyebrows. But as the day went on, Jack was starting to find he actually enjoyed the boys’ company. He watched them, curious and amused by their mannerisms, the easy brotherly way they jibed each other, listening to them talk. 

David in particular, as the older of the two, near Jack’s age, had a hell of a lot to say. He was simultaneously both sharply suspicious of everything around him, and also extraordinarily open, talking Jack’s ear off regularly during their day’s work, about anything and everything, even when Jack hadn’t asked him a question in the first place. 

Jack was starting to feel like he didn’t even mind the hapless pomposity that had come across when they’d first met that morning. David still made his opinions known on what he called _your way of doing things_ to Jack – but he’d grown quiet now and again to listen, to take Jack’s lead and pay attention, in a way Jack couldn’t pretend hadn't flattered him some. 

And the kid was earnest, too, like there wasn’t a sly or sneaky bone in his body. He seemed sincere about everything, his face genuine and obvious in its displays of interest, distaste, irritation, excitement. Most people Jack knew were all made up of angles and edges, rough-cut somehow, like they’d been hammered and chiselled from the inside out, their fears and hardships making them into the shape of something flinty and sharp. David had a softness to him, unweathered by work and the wretchedness of misery, that Jack couldn’t help noticing.

“Why don’t we go back to my place?” David says now. The sun’s long gone down, and Les has fallen asleep on a bench, totally unconcerned with his surroundings, sunk into the easy sleep of a nine-year old kid who doesn’t have anything to fear. “We need to get Les to bed. And we can divvy up the day’s pay. You can meet my folks. I’m sure Ma’ll be happy for you to stay for dinner.” He’s saying it to Jack the way he’s said everything the whole day – a question that’s not really a question, with all the expectation of agreement behind it. 

“You sure?” Jack asks. He gives the younger kid a little poke, but Les just mumbles sleepily and curls up tighter.

“I’m sure,” David says. “I have to get Les home soon or Ma’ll kill me.”

“Kid’s out like a light.”

“Put him on your shoulders, then. He’s not all that heavy.”

“So I’m just your pack horse, is it?”

“Well, you’re probably stronger than me. And I think Les might be pretending to sleep just so you’ll carry him.” David rolls his eyes. “You made a real impression with that Cowboy lark.”

“Not on you, is what you’re sayin’.”

“I’m not nine years old.” David’s smile is wry. “Takes more than tales of the Wild West to impress me.”

That odd thrill again, in the pit of Jack’s stomach. He has a chance, he realizes, to become absolutely anything in David’s eyes. “So I’m startin’ to see,” he murmurs. Then he picks Les up gently, and hoists him into his arms. 

They walk a while together, until they get to a plain-looking apartment building, a group of kids with dirty hands playing with sticks just outside the steps that lead up to it, lines of washing criss-crossing from balconies and nettled grids of iron fire escapes adorning the sides. 

“Home sweet home, huh,” Jack says, mostly to himself. 

David splays his hands and looks hesitant for a moment, but then he just shoves his hands into his pockets and shrugs instead. “You wanna come inside?”

“Well I ain’t come all this way just to go back to the Lo— back home.” _The Lodging House_ , Jack had honestly meant to say, but his tongue had tripped over itself, somehow.

“Your folks don’t mind you staying out?”

“I – no.” Jack feels a little quickening of his heart. It’s not a shameful thing, living at the Lodge, better by miles than the streets, and Jack’s got no reason to believe that David and his socialist politics would turn his nose up at the idea. But still – “They’re out west,” he finds himself saying, after a moment. “Lookin’ for a place to live. It’s just me for now. But they said they’d be back real soon, and they’ll send for me soon as they find it. It’s gonna be a real nice place. Plenty of room. Couple a’ palominos on the ranch, ya know. A sweet deal.”

“Oh. Sure.” David looks like he doesn’t believe Jack entirely, but he’s too polite to say so. “Thanks for carrying Les, by the way. He’s not usually – um, I don’t think he’s used to working so hard.” David laughs, self-deprecating. “Me either, for that matter.”

Jack lets out a small snort, but finds he hadn’t meant it unkindly. 

David looks at him sideways, and grins, easy and honest, like they’re sharing a joke together. “Guess you noticed that.” 

They’re at a door now, faded green paint and cracked wood, and David is looking at Jack, still smiling, holding his eyes maybe for just a little too long.


	9. Chapter 9

“So where’s the new kid from?” someone says, half-muffled by a towel as the rag-tag huddle of boys in the Lodging House crowd around the basins to wash up and get ready for the day. 

Race yanks the towel away, and Skittery – a tall kid with round eyes and a pretty face – blinks wetly from behind it. “What ya talkin’ about?” Race says, rubbing his own neck dry. 

Skittery grabs the towel back, zipping it out of Race’s fingers with a scowl. “The new kid. David. He ain’t stayin’ here, I checked. An’ he don’t seem to be the type for sleepin’ on the streets. He got his own place?”

“How in heck would I know?” Race says, snapping his suspenders up over his shoulders as he does up the buttons of his shirt. 

Behind him, Blink – short-tempered, big-mouthed and quick to stick his nose in – gives Skittery a shove with his shoulder as he comes past. “Why ya so in’erested anyways? Seemed like a real hoity-toity type to me.”

“Just askin’. Ain’t that allowed?”

Jack’s standing at the basin, contemplating the cold water in it. “He lives with his folks,” he says, after a moment. “With his kid brother and older sister, too. Small place, ain’t too far from here.” The water he splashes on his face to clean it is freezing and his skin prickles from the chill. He rubs his sleeve over his face vigorously and when he looks up, Skittery, Race and Blink are all looking at him. 

“Got his own _folks,_ does he?” Race says. 

“How do you know where he lives?” Skittery says. 

“He’s got a sister?” Blink says.

Jack doesn’t answer them. Despite the cold water for washing, it feels uncomfortably warm this morning, sweat gathering under his arms already. “Ain’t you got better things to do than stand around gossipin’ like old ladies?” he says. 

Somewhere, a bell rings.

*****

The news comes to them all, as the news always does, on the big blackboard above the distribution center. The headline’s fair this morning – _Bloody Beatings in Trolley Strike_ stretches above them – and the boys have a spring in their step as they go to collect. And then Jack finds himself stopped in his tracks. Blink, coming down the walkway, an incensed look on his face, his one good eye narrowed and a red flush high on his pale cheeks.

"They jacked up the goddamn price."

They all start muttering – an increase of ten cents per hundred on their buying price, written there above their heads in quiet, chalky numbers, as if Pulitzer thought he could sneak it past them, like it was nothing; a pittance, instead of the difference between being able to eat or not. 

"Ain't there nothin' we can do? Ain't nobody got a plan?"

A crowd of heads turns, expectantly, to Jack.

Jack doesn’t have a plan. He never has a plan, for anything. He's lived his whole life according to no great scheme, without any forethought, unpredictable events and unexpected circumstances dictating the tumultuous mess he’s been navigating so far, relying on luck alone and the skin of his teeth. There’s only one thing Jack knows to follow, for better or for worse, and that’s the kick in his gut telling him it’s time to do something reckless and stupid. 

"We ain't goin' through those gates," he says, slowly and clearly, "until they put the price back where it was." 

It’s David who puts the words to it, into Jack’s ear – words suspended in mid-air; an idea, thin and shimmering and volatile. "Like a strike?"

“Yeah,” Jack says, as a hush falls over them all. “We’re going on strike.”

*****

They’re outside in the sun one afternoon, painting signs while the heat on the back of their necks turns them flushed red and damp in their collars. The kids who know how to spell are writing out _STOP THE WORLD_ in bold letters on wooden placards, and the ones who don’t are doing the legwork, spreading the word to kids across the city.

They're a frenzied hive of activity, young boys giving even younger boys jobs to do, curly-haired kids putting their heads together counting up their coins, children with missing teeth and grubby noses walking across the city putting out a call-to-arms. For anyone looking in, they seem a ragged and leaderless bunch, with no captain, no boss, no guard, no politician, no one’s Ma or Pa telling them what to do or where to go. 

But they have Jack Kelly. 

David’s there too, notebook and pencil in hand, planning, making notes, writing things down. They make for an odd team, the two of them at the head of a revolution – David, in his waistcoat and curly-soft hair, staid and secure and with a manner and confidence beyond his years; Jack in his shirt full of holes, long-haired and wild, feeling like he's always just scrabbling for a handhold at the edge of all the moving parts. 

For all Jack's got to know him, he still doesn't quite know what to make of David. Jack has _friends_ already; Racetrack, Mush, Blink – kids who look like him and sound like him and live like him. David isn’t like them at all. David got dropped on them like a loose package bucked off the back of a horsecart, unexpected and foreign, and Jack feels like he’s still holding that package in his hands, unsure of its contents, unsure of how to handle it. 

And there’s an unnerving new weight of responsibility on Jack’s shoulders, now, this revolt and all the boys looking to him to tell them what to do, and Jack feels the unspooling of it in every direction, wildly unplanned and uncontrolled. For whatever David is to him, he's somehow become the anchor at the center of it all.

“Hey Jack.” Dutchy, pale-faced and pink-cheeked, with eyelashes so light they’re almost white around his eyes, shuffles over, holding a sign at chest height and angling it so Jack can see it. “S’that look right to you?”

Jack tilts his head and scans the letters. “N-E-W-S-E-S O-N S-T-R-I-K.” He gets to his feet and brushes off his knees. “Close, Dutch.” He points at the sign. “You need an ‘I’ there, and an ‘E’ there.”

“Right.” Dutchy frowns at the sign. “Do I gotta start again?”

“Nah you ain’t. Put it in small, it’ll be fine. You done good, Dutch.”

Dutchy nods, pleased, and walks off with his paintbrush. When Jack turns back, David’s looking at him, arms folded, saying nothing but seeming like he wants to. David’s got a way of doing that, Jack’s noticed. “What?” Jack asks. 

“Nothing,” David says, shrugging, and there’s an odd smile on him, small and a bit crooked, like he’s trying to keep it from growing too much.

“No, go on, spit it out.” Jack’s inspecting the signs, checking if they’re dry, ready to use for the rally at Medda’s they’ve been planning for weeks. They’ve got the word out across New York, expecting newsies from all over to come down and make a noise so loud not even Pulitzer himself will be able to ignore them.

But David just shakes his head. “I told you, it’s nothing.” He turns instead to his notebook, and scribbles something in there. “Denton’s going to be at the rally.”

Bryan Denton – journalist, opportunity, possible ally – seems to have made an impression on David, and Jack’s not sure if he finds it funny or annoying, the way David looks up to Denton, based on nothing more than his credentials as a newspaper man, like that would be reason enough to trust him. “Right,” Jack says. 

“I don’t know why you don’t like him,” David says. “The kind of exposure we can get in The Sun is exactly what we need to get the word out—”

“I know that. It was my idea.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Ain’t no problem,” Jack says, and he starts gathering up an armful of signs that have dried in the hot noon sun. “Long as he keeps his end of the deal.”

“He will. He’s trustworthy. _I_ trust him,” David says. Jack scoffs, quietly, without really meaning to, but David looks chagrined. “Don’t you?”

“Naw, I trust him fine, Davey.” Jack hoists another sign into the pile he’s holding to his chest. The truth, if Jack were to admit it, is less that Jack doesn’t trust Denton, and more that he doesn’t like the kinds of questions the man could ask. There’s enough of Jack’s past in the city, trails of old ghosts winding smoke-like behind him, things he can’t escape and things he doesn’t want to remember. He doesn’t need a reporter picking at them, too, scratching away at the scabs. 

“So you’ll talk to him at the rally? You know, like an interview?”

“If he wants to talk, we’ll talk,” Jack shrugs. He turns to go, but there’s a plank of wood that he doesn’t notice, still drying in the sun, and he trips, signs clattering to the floor, pitching headfirst to the ground.

Before he can fall on his face, David’s caught him in his arms. 

There’s a moment where Jack just wheezes, fingers clutching the back of David’s shoulders, and then a moment when he tries, embarrassed, to untangle himself, but finds he can’t, because David is still holding on. 

“Try not to injure yourself before the rally, Jack, it’ll really put a dent in our plans,” David says, laughing a bit, and Jack straightens up to regain his balance so he’s not leaning his whole weight onto David’s chest, but he can't move all the way back because David’s arms are still incomprehensibly wrapped round him, palms flat against his shoulderblades, holding him carefully. 

What Jack wants to do is laugh at David, call him an old lady for fussing, but his tongue feels cottony and thick in his mouth, and his throat’s gone tight. He remembers all at once another boy who touched him like this a long time ago, gentle hands instead of rough like he was used to, so long ago and so quickly gone Jack can’t remember his name or what he looked like. “Right,” Jack says. “Thanks.”

“Come on.” David releases Jack, but he doesn’t move away yet, fingers going up instead to straighten Jack’s collar, neatening his neckerchief. His fingers touch the skin of Jack’s neck, oddly cool in the heat. “Back to work.”

David turns to the mess of signposts and placards on the floor, and bends to start gathering them together. Turning away, Jack scrubs a hand roughly over his face, trying to stop it from burning.


	10. Chapter 10

The rally is a disaster. 

Jack should’ve known that, sooner or later, trouble was going to rear its head. Even surrounded by a barrier of voices, hundreds of them, determined fists in the air on all sides, there’s something out there, a run of too-good-to-be-true luck that turns nasty, a kind of misfortune that runs in his blood, his Sullivan blood, lying in wait to trip him up and take him down.

It comes, as it has before, in the shape of warden Snyder. His face – the rubber-pink shine to his pouchy cheeks and the unnerving, colourless glint of his eyes moving predatorily through the crowd – it makes Jack’s stomach turn when he sees it. And he’s seen it before, a good many times, both sleeping and awake. He should have known – all these years of running and hiding, and now he’s put himself front and center-stage. It’s his own damn fault.

He runs, but not fast or far enough – they’re surrounded by mounted guards on horses huge and rearing up, kids getting trampled in the furious stampede to the exist. Somewhere, Jack hears Medda scream the name Racetrack, and the heart that was in his throat sinks plummets to his guts and leaves him feeling a cold, messy, sick fear. It’s gone wrong – it’s all gone horribly wrong, and he’s powerless to stop any of it. He’s nine years old again, suddenly, running from a commotion, from shouting, from violence. He’s short of breath and running and running – and then he gets smacked hard in the face, and he falls, an ache in his jaw and a sharp, smarting pain in his eye. 

There are thick, meaty hands everywhere grabbing tight at his arms and legs, forcing him down as he struggles against the feel of the fingers pressing new bruises into the ghosts of old ones, five or six men on him at once, like he’s some kind of real Wild West outlaw, wanted dead or alive, instead of a dumb kid with big ideas and not enough smarts to save himself and his friends. 

Under the confusion, David’s voice, cracked and frantic, is calling him.

****

*****

They take him to see Pulitzer. 

And what an _honor_ it is, Jack thinks, sardonic and suspicious as they drag him, cuffed like the rotten criminal they’ve all decided he is, to a set of heavy and elaborate doors that stand like sentinels in a glass-and-marble hallway. Through the doors, there’s a heavy-carpeted room lined with musty oak bookshelves, leather-bound journals piled on a dark wood desk that gleams with polish, gilt-framed photographs of grand-looking men in uniforms hanging on the wall. One of the pictures is of Pulitzer himself, serious and shrewd and looking down at Jack from his vantage point up there. 

“Mr. Sullivan. Good of you to join us.”

Pulitzer in the flesh comes into the room, walking down the stairs with grave ease, descending on Jack from above, a judgmental echo of his portrait on the wall, condescending through his thick-lensed spectacles. He’s wearing a fancy velvet jacket and his beard is trimmed clean and precise, and he smells of expensive soap and spiced alcohol. 

Ragged, bruised, penniless, sitting on Pulitzer’s plush red cushions and soft-backed armchair, Jack is as out of place as a fish up a tree. Pulitzer doesn’t have to crack a whip to show Jack he’s got all the marbles. 

“Didn’t really have a choice, there, Joe,” Jack says, insolent, slouching in the expensive armchair. “Your good friends were real polite in bringin’ me here.”

Pulitzer smiles, benign, but his eyes flash behind his light wire-rimmed glasses. He sits in a chair opposite Jack, and there’s a clink of glass as he uncaps a decanter of brandy to pour himself a glass. The liquid glugs, and Jack waits, silent. Pulitzer takes a sip, then leans forward. “I know that you’re a smart man, Mr. Sullivan.”

There’s a slow rage dragging up through Jack’s guts. The unfairness of it all, and the humiliation, too, of getting caught, _Sullivan_ again, just a petty nobody like his Pa, a good-for-nothing criminal that got swallowed up by the city and was never mourned by anyone.

“Please,” Jack says through bared teeth. “Call me Jack.”

Pulitzer leans back in his chair. He pulls a pipe out from inside the pocket of his lush, deep-red robes, wrapped around him like an emperor. He takes a moment to tap it against the table, then lights it, sucking deeply as he puffs a whorling cloud of pungent smoke. It reaches Jack, and Jack blinks, eyes watering, but he sets his jaw and doesn’t move back. 

“I’ve brought you here to offer you an opportunity, Mr. Sullivan, despite your insolence, and your criminal record, so you’d do well to listen carefully. I’m offering you the opportunity to work for me.” Pulitzer points the end of his pipe at Jack. “If you give up this petty strike, and you work for me – for good money, good wages – I will _personally_ ensure all charges against you are dropped. You get the chance to start over. A clean slate. If you work for me, if you give up the strike, you will make more money in three days than you could make on your own in—” He makes a flickering, dismissive hand gesture. “Three lifetimes. After that, do what you want, buy a train ticket and get the hell out of here, I don’t care. You’ll be free to go.”

There’s a moment of silence. Pulitzer puffs on his pipe, and his eyes glint sharp through the smoke. Jack can hear his own pulse in his ears in the quiet surrounding them, and it’s all Jack can do not to laugh at the absurdity, sitting there in his dirty, dusty clothes on gilt-edged chairs, being blackmailed by one of the most powerful men in New York.

“You’re right, Joe,” Jack says. “I am smart. Smart enough to figure I must have ya pretty scared. You ain’t usually concerned with us – we’re just the rabble outside your window. If you had it all figured out you could just close them windows, ignore us like you always do. But here you are – comin’ to me with your _opportunity_. Must be serious, right? Must be losin’ a lotta money. I must be makin’ it real hard for you out there if you want me on your side so bad. So what’s wrong, Joe? What’s the truth? You worried of losing to a bunch of kids?”

There’s a flash across Pulitzer’s face and his jaw clenches. Jack imagines he can hear the sound of his teeth grinding and he gets the urge again, stupidly, to laugh. But then Pulitzer sits back in his chair, surveying Jack through his glasses, fingers steepled beneath his chin, and his voice when he speaks is quiet, calm. 

“Do you think for a moment that the others out there will get the same treatment, if this strike goes on? You think the police won’t just round them all up, throw them in a cell to rot? You think they’ll be offered _jobs?_ This strike will end, boy, make no mistake, with or without you. I am giving you the option, right now, to choose the fates of your friends, as well as your own.” He smiles, but it’s an ugly, calculating look. “Your partner, for example,” he continues. His hands meander as he speaks, like he’s searching his thoughts, like he hasn’t considered, hasn’t planned every moment of this intervention meticulously. “What’s his name? Ah yes – David Jacobs.”

It’s like a stone being dropped into a river. The cold ripples of it spread through Jack and a jagged weight calcifies in the pit of his stomach. It seems unsettlingly obvious, now that Jack finds himself sitting there, fingers gripping the wooden arms of his chair, that _this_ would be the card Pulitzer would use against him. The thought of David in jail gives Jack a rush of nausea, a sickness and desperation that he’d only ever associated with the feeling of holding onto his mother, when his father’s footsteps came, lumbering and heavy, down the hallway towards them. It’s fear. Fear on behalf of someone he cares about too much, someone he needs to keep safe, and the realization of that truth makes him feel like he just stepped off a bridge. 

“You have until morning,” Pulitzer says, and pushes him out through the door to the waiting guards.

Later that night, curled and dejected in his cellar, Jack pokes miserably at his thoughts, as sore and uncomfortable in his head as the bumps and bruises on his body. Next to him, there’s a grey suit, clean-smelling, soft-looking, cut to his size.

****

*****

The faces of Jack’s friends when they see him the following day, Pulitzer’s dirty money in his pocket, a scab’s jacket on his back, is enough to cow him into a shame so vivid it burns him. 

They hurl insults and hurt words at him, calling him _scab,_ and _traitor,_ though he steels himself against it with the knowledge that it’s for the best. Jack Kelly is just a dumbass kid, too cocky for his own good, and they’d all do better without him dragging them into jail and worse behind him. 

And there’s the money. _Real money,_ Pulitzer had said, for the first time in Jack’s life, the likes of which he hasn’t seen since watching the stacks of it get handled and passed around him at card games in rooms he shouldn’t have been in, when his Pa would sit him in a corner and tell him to keep his mouth shut. Enough money to stop scrounging, to stop scratching a living off the streets with his fingernails. Enough money to get out of New York for good, to hop a train-cart into the sunset, to go west, easy and free.

Jack feels possibility of that future so tangibly he can taste it, _feel_ it, the red-dust heat of the desert on his skin instead of the wet-clogged stink of the city. 

But in the crowd, David’s steely-blue eyes look at Jack in cold disgust. Then he looks down and away, and Jack feels something hot and angry and rageful grab like a hand squeezing from inside his chest; anger at this, at the strike, at the judge and the warden and Pulitzer, at Francis Sullivan and his dead mother and goddamn New York city itself, choking all the life out of him. 

****

*****

Jack bears it, the betrayal and disdain, for a few days. Every paper sold and penny gained leaves him feeling wretched, but he keeps himself going with the knowledge that, at least, it keeps his friends out of harm’s way. So long as Jack stays away, they won’t find themselves mixed up with a convict and the son of a criminal and a kid stupid enough to think he could take on _Pulitzer_. The strike is disintegrating around him, and all he wants is to get through its dispiriting end with a clear conscience that nobody got hurt.

And then, whether on orders from higher up, or through their own pig-headed thirst for violence, the Delanceys go for David anyway. 

Alerted by her shouts, Jack finds Sarah half-lying on the ground, disoriented and frightened, holding Les close to her. In the corner by a pile of crates, Oscar Delancey’s got David in a headlock, David hanging limp and winded in his grip. In front of him, Morris is winding back a fist decked in a nasty-looking duster, the kind that’d break all your teeth, leave you battered on the floor choking on mouthfuls of your own blood. 

Jack careens forward and punches Oscar across the face, throwing him against a stack of boxes, not caring about the sickening crack he hears, wooden slats or bones, it doesn’t matter. 

When he whirls around, he sees Morris and David collapsed in a struggle of limbs. He drags Morris away, spins him round to face him, and cracks the hardest part of his forehead to the softest part of Morris’ nose, flooring him without a sound as the boy collapses in pain and surprise. 

He helps Sarah to her feet, and they both pick David up, the fear and anger draining from him like rainwater down the gutter. Race had said it right all along – it was a rigged deck. If you played by the rules, you could never win, no matter what.

He leaves his scab papers and Pulitzer’s empty promises in the dust. 

****

*****

After, his friends come back to him, one by one.

“You scared us real good there, Cowboy,” Race says, shaking Jack’s hand, like a corporal welcoming a returning soldier home, and Race is half Jack’s height, but Jack still feels small. 

“Welcome back, Jack,” Mush says, beaming almost, like he never doubted Jack for a moment.

David folds his arms and says, “Any other secrets you’ve been keeping from me?”

Jack folds his arms, too. “None I can think of.”

A muscle in David’s jaw twitches as he clenches it. “Why couldn’t you just have been honest with me?” he says, finally. “Would it have been so hard? Telling me the truth? You never even told me your real name. What should I call you? Jack? _Francis?”_

“It’s Jack.” Jack’s mouth is dry. “It’s always been Jack. For as long as it’s mattered. That’s the truth.”

David’s eyes are fixed on him, flickering minutely up and down as if he’s searching for something. “And that’s it? There’s no more lies between us? You promise?”

“None.” Jack feels his face go red, embarrassed somehow by the intensity of David’s gaze, the way he wears his heart and feelings so plain, the way he tries to get Jack to do the same. “Promise.”

There’s a pause. Then David says, “I get why – I mean, you screwed us, you did, and no one could believe it. Everyone got angry because they couldn’t believe it. I think we can guess what sorts of things they must’ve said to you to make you cross the line.”

Jack shoves his hands deep in his pockets. “I ain’t proud of it, Davey,” he mutters.

“I know.” David reaches out to grip Jack’s elbow as he says it. “I get it. I think – I think it was brave, what you tried to do, you know, for your friends. I just wished you would’ve been honest from the start. I could’ve helped, you know. You didn’t have to lie to me, or – or do it alone.” David looks away then, and he says, off to one side, with a kind of casualness that Jack doesn’t share because his stomach is in incomprehensible knots, “What was it that changed your mind, then? You could’ve been halfway off to Santa Fe by sunset if you’d kept the money.”

Jack feels his heart banging oddly against his ribs. “I ain’t very smart, I guess,” he says.

“Right.” There’s a look on David’s face, something tangled and sad that’s not just principles and politics, but something else. “Is that all?”

There is something Jack thinks maybe he could say, now, something on the tip of his tongue, but the shape of the words suddenly feels too big and raw for him to get around, too honest in a way that feels like he’d fall right apart if he let it out, and he’d said he was done lying, but it’s not a lie if he doesn’t say anything at all.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay in posting, i was travelling the windy wilds of the irish coast last week in the very unseasonal cold. hope this chapter is worth the wait...!

Jack turned eighteen, quietly and without ceremony, as the dust settled on the strike’s success. 

The whirlwind of politics and protests dissipated in a strange, empty lurch into silence. The warm winds of victory had only lasted for so long, buffeting their unlikely band of heroes sky-high for a moment, before they lulled, and they were brought gently and firmly back to earth. 

Time kept moving on as it always did; the newspapers had stopped being interested in telling their story as soon as a better headline came along; the union disbanded, now that it no longer had a purpose. The boys went back to work – those who still sold papers marvelled at the relative improvement in their circumstances, but most still went to work with holes in their shoes. It didn’t seem much a change of scene to Jack. 

He’d needed a new trade that summer since he was too old for papers, and he started working at Irving Hall instead, swapping Joe Pulitzer for Joe Cobb as his new boss, the ruddy-faced handyman at the theatre who’d employed Jack at Medda’s request.

David, on the other hand, had done what his Pa had wanted him to do all along, and gone back to school. 

It had been keeping him busy; Jack had called by a few times at the Jacobses’ apartment in recent weeks, but David had always been away or occupied. _He’s working so hard,_ Esther had said, when Jack had enquired, haltingly, uncomfortably aware it was the third time he’d called at their apartment and been met with the same sorry twist on Mrs. Jacobs’ face when she’d said David wasn’t there. 

It was a sore point with Jack, though he told no one about it. A few months of him and Davey being joined at the hip, and now he felt off-balance without him, like he’d had a limb removed and still had the phantom feel of it, aware of the outline of where something wasn’t.

It didn’t make any sense, because Jack had been a whole person before David, and there was no reason he should feel like anything less now. 

He just felt like everything he’d finally gotten a hold of was slipping away from him, while he was stuck standing still, watching dust clouds roll out as an imagined future retreated further and further into the distance. 

Up on the roof of the Irving Hall theatre, the sun on his back and his eyes blurry from sweat, Jack pauses to wipe the back of his hand over his brow. It’s a hot, bright and harsh afternoon at the end of August, no clouds scudding across the open skies, no breeze to cool him, and he aches in every knot in his spine. 

“Alright Kelly, Montoya,” Joe Cobb says, dropping his tools with a clunk. “Reckon we’re done here.”

Wade Montoya is the other guy in Joe’s employ. Thickset and heavy-jawed, he’s got five years, six inches and forty pounds on Jack. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, making easy work of hauling heavy set-pieces around for Medda’s shows; grand pianos wide enough for a girl to recline on, solid dark-wood tables to dance around, and once, memorably, the broken hull of an old ship for a new nautical number. Jack’s not halfway near as big as Wade, but he’s got a knack for making broken things fixed, so he has his uses. 

With tools carefully secure in belts around their waists, they swing down the ladder resting on the roof several feet below of the cigar and tobacco shop next door to Irving Hall, then onto the fire escape, and finally down into the rear courtyard, where Medda is standing, watching them with bright, narrow eyes against the sun. 

“How’s my roof, Joe?” Medda asks, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. Her cigarette’s all stained red where she holds it between her lips. She still wears dresses in outlandish colors as she’d always done since Jack had known her, her red hair piled in brassy loops atop her head, but she wears the pearls around her neck a little thicker, the rings on her fingers a little heavier, since she’d come into a lot of money marrying the very rich, very old Sheridan Thorncroft, the previous owner of Irving Hall, who’d died shortly after. 

“Good as new,” Joe says, tapping the hammer in his belt.

“I’m glad you all got back down in one piece,” Medda says. “I was watching you up there, you looked high up enough to see heaven through the clouds.” She smiles, red lips curling back on a plume of grey smoke, and her eyes flick to Wade, who’s standing complacently, overalls rolled to his waist, vest stuck with sweat to his chest. “I think I might’ve even spotted an angel.”

Joe snorts. “Miss Medda, we ain’t exactly scrapin’ skies.”

Medda just smiles, her eyes still on Wade for a moment. Jack follows her glance, but Wade is looking elsewhere as he scrubs a hand through his thick curls, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Then she beckons them with bright pink nails. “Alright, come on down, boys, and have yourselves a drink.”

*

Later, with his day’s wages in his pocket, and the lingering, muggy taste of beer on his tongue, Jack’s in the club’s basement, tugging off his overalls, when Wade walks in. 

“Got paid, did ya,” Jack says, struggling to stay upright as his foot gets stuck.

“I did,” Wade says. Then, “Easy,” as he steps closer, offering Jack a hand to steady him. 

“Thanks.” Jack shakes the work clothes into a pile on the floor. He pulls his red neckerchief from his back pocket and loops it in a loose knot at the base of his throat.

Wade sits down on a timber beam on the floor and begins unlacing his boots. He doesn’t talk much, Jack’s noticed, but he always looks like he’s thinking, face stern and concentrated as he picks at the knots in his laces. His hands move delicately for a man whose arms are so thick, interconnecting muscles making a hard path of skin and sinew to his broad, square shoulders. 

Jack watches him for a moment, then says, “Saw Medda givin’ you the eye out there.” 

Wade peers up at Jack, arms on his knees, then he stands up slowly, kicking his boots off, first the left, then the right. “Yeah?” he says, and he sounds faintly amused.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Coy, ya know, under her lashes, like women do.”

Wade smiles easily, and shrugs. “Didn’t notice. I wasn’t lookin’.” He turns his back to Jack and pulls the grease-stained vest up over his head. His curly black hair comes up ruffled, thick shadows on his neck. For a moment, he stands with the vest in his hands, passing it from one to the other, as if he’s debating something in his mind, and the wide planes of his shoulders shift subtly as he does so. And then, abruptly, he turns around and fixes Jack with a look. From the front, Jack can see that sweat has made clear tracks through the dirt on his chest, clean lines down his stomach. “You are, though.”

“I’m what?” Jack says, eyes snapping up, and even though the air is warm and close in the basement, his skin prickles like he’s cold.

“Lookin’.” Wade steps forward, all the way forward so he’s stood inches from Jack. Jack leans back, pressing himself into the wall. He can feel the rough texture of it under his palms, flat against his sides. 

Wade’s hand goes up and around the back of Jack’s neck.

“What—” Jack says, and his voice is thin and soft. He clears his throat, stiffens his back and says again, “What are you doing?”

Wade is looking at Jack with eyes too deeply knowing, making Jack feel somehow like his skin’s all been unpeeled, and there’s a telling twist in Jack’s guts from it, hot and distinct. His mind is scrabbling as he remembers, suddenly, another image here, in Irving Hall, of two men leaning into one another – Cuddy, the piano player, and Mal the bartender, the barest outline of them lit up in moonlight. Jack had watched them back then, unsure, with a fear and yearning in his chest he hadn’t known how to name. 

He thinks maybe he’d be able to name it now. Now, with Wade leaning into him, his chest tightening with that same scared and needful feeling.

Wade lowers his face to Jack’s and lightly kisses his cheek, chaste and dry. It’s almost nothing, barely there, but Jack feels himself burning up from the touch, torn between the instinct to shove and run, and the newer, muddier instinct to give in, to ask for more. 

The decision is made for him when Wade’s fingers pull Jack’s shirt collar away so his lips can find skin, and without thinking Jack turns his head, bares his neck, so Wade can kiss him there, just above the sweep down to his collarbone. 

When he does, Jack makes a sound, high and unintended, and Wade hushes him, fingers coming away from their grip in the back of Jack’s hair to cover his lips instead, thick and pressed where Jack’s mouth opens, pushing against his teeth. Jack lets out another sound at that, helpless and overcome. 

He’d never looked too deeply into in his thoughts since they’d started asking for things he hadn’t known how to give. If he’d ever desired anything, anyone, it had only ever been in carefully isolated flashes of skin, devoid of context, anonymous bodies belonging to no one. 

Foolishly, Jack probes the thought for a split-second – _hadn’t he?_ – and that’s all it takes for the cracks in his mind to open up, for the fragments of his skull to fall away, the realisation sudden and heavy like a freight cart colliding into him, devastating and blatant. His whole body coils tight in shame and heat because there, suddenly, at the forefront of his imagination, is David. 

David standing in front of him, his forearms flexed as he grabs Jack’s shoulders, his collarbone bared because he’d stopped wearing the tie Jack always ragged on at him for, his lips twisted because of something Jack said, and Jack watching him, wanting, so dizzyingly, to smooth the expression away with his thumb, to touch him in the way he’s wanted to maybe since they first met.

Wade’s mouth is still at the angle of Jack’s neck and jaw, teeth scraping lightly, and his hand is a searing print on Jack’s lower belly, moving down with purpose and dizzying intent.

But Jack pushes Wade away from him, head reeling, hard in his pants, and feeling sick and stupid all at once because he wants but he _can’t._

Wade still doesn’t have a shirt or boots on, his overalls rolled to the waist, his brown feet bare and flexed against the dirt-packed floor. Jack does, so he turns and leaves first.


	12. Chapter 12

The winters in New York are bitter and wet with snow, and the people hurrying to and fro are black marks against the grey-white slush. The air this morning is sharp and damp with the blooming breath of the city, threatening the slow onset of a December frost.

Jack’s leaning up against the outside of a squat, square building made of rough brown stone. Despite the weak winter sun that brings a welcome, distant warmth, he’s frozen on his feet. He’s tired too, up for work at six that morning to deal with a flooding situation that was staining the fancy carpets of the Irving Hall box office.

He’s waiting. He’s been waiting for a while, an hour, maybe two, and he’s starting to think this was a stupid idea. But his thoughts are interrupted by the swinging open of heavy doors to the entrance of the building, and a sudden tide of people spills out, all of them in types of formal-looking clothes; long woollen coats with collars turned up against the cold, and a scuffle of shined shoes heading outdoors.

Jack wipes his hands on his pants, a soapy, greasy mix always clammy and present on his skin, and now chilled sweat too, as his eyes follow the bobbing heads of the men – boys, still, really – moving past him, all of them either eyeing Jack with suspicion, or not looking at him at all.

“Jack!”

Jack hears David before he sees him, and when he turns and their eyes meet, David’s are wide behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles Jack’s never seen him wear before.

Jack’s guts turn over like he missed a step on the stairs, a leaping, hopeful, and nervous feeling all at once. He raises a hesitant hand in greeting. David is stock still, too surprised, apparently, to move. 

“What are you doing here?” David asks. He’s wearing a waistcoat with polished buttons that looks fancier than anything Jack’s seen him in before, but he’s also got a coat on that looks too big for him, a beat-up brown thing with the cuffs rolled back, like something that might have belonged to Mayer before. His tie must have come loose through the day, because the knot is pulled away from his throat, and Jack knows David would certainly have done his buttons up to the top when he got dressed in the morning. His curls are longer, ruffled by the wind.

Jack is suddenly filled with such a sharp, aching sense of familiarity, he feels almost sick with it.

“I – was in the neighbourhood.” Jack rubs his forehead with the back of his hand, and it comes away dirt-brown. He rubs the hand on his sleeve instead. “I was just – Medda wanted me to run some errands, so I was comin’ this way.”

“Oh,” David says. “Well, I’m glad. It’s been a while.” He’s looking at Jack from behind his glasses, eyes still as bright blue as they ever were, and they’re flickering over him, as if he’s unsure where to settle.

“You’ve been busy.”

“Yeah I – I have been.” David tugs his coat around him. “Turns out studying labor law takes time. There’s a lot to learn.”

“Right.” Jack nods. David bites his lip, but doesn’t say anything more, and Jack feels himself struggling with an embarrassment or shyness that he doesn’t know what to do with. It’s been about four months since he last saw David, hardly a lifetime, and yet with everything that’s been on his mind during that time, he feels like he doesn’t know what to say to him anymore. “So how, uh. How’d the guys in there feel bein’ around the leader of a real revolution? Impressed, I bet.”

David puts his hands in his pockets. “It’s not – it’s not really like that. It’s – you have to read about the laws, the legislation. You can’t just make it up. I don’t have anything over the others, I still had to start at the bottom and learn the real stuff—”

“The real stuff,” Jack repeats blandly.

“The stuff that’ll stand up in a court of law.” David winces. “You know what I mean. There’s a lot of reading to do.”

Jack’s shoulders feel a little stiff. “So I heard. Your ma said you was busy.”

“Well, yeah,” David says. He pauses for a moment. “Look, if you’re asking after Sarah—”

“I’m not,” Jack says quickly, because he isn’t. “How is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s – you know, she’s seeing someone new.”

“How would I know that?”

“Right.” David fiddles with the cuffs on his coat. When Jack doesn’t say anything, he carries on, “Well. His name’s Isaac. This fella. Sarah won’t stop talking about him. Says he’s everything. Smart, charming, handsome, _political_ , always talking about some movement, or cause.” David sighs. “So she’s, you know – _going_ with him, now. Mom and Pops don’t know yet, but I guess they can’t be so surprised, after you.” David cuts Jack a sideways look. “Sarah’s got a type, turns out.”

“Don’t really need to hear all the details.”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“It’s alright. I ain’t heartbroken, still.” It had ended between them, abruptly, Sarah nervous and sad, trying to explain to Jack that she did care for him, dearly, but something wasn’t right, or something wasn’t there, and she hoped he wouldn’t be too upset. Her words hadn’t hurt Jack, and he’d felt guilty for that most of all.

“Right.” David shrugs. “I just thought—”

“Thought what?”

“Maybe that’s why you’d stopped calling by. Still heartbroken. Ma kept wondering, ‘Where’s Jack got to these days?’ And Les asked after you, too.”

Jack feels something curl inside him, a strangely pleased feeling, but guilty too, hopeful and regretful all at once. Before he can say anything, someone else appears by David’s side.

“Excuse me, I’m so sorry to interrupt,” the boy says, pleasantly, and lays a hand on David’s shoulder. He’s tall and a little imposing in his size, with hair even curlier than David’s, and darker, too, an inky black that coils like a bird’s nest. He’s not wearing a tie, but he’s got a buttoned waistcoat on and slacks that fall straight and creaseless. He’s a little portly, belly pushing at the buttons of his waistcoat, his face round and plump without edges or angles, half-buried in a large and soft-looking scarf that he flicks elegantly over one shoulder. He smiles, and nothing wrinkles or furrows when he does. Jack licks over his own split lips, cracked and dried out from the frozen wind.

“What?” Jack says, since neither David nor the stranger are saying anything. The stranger is looking at Jack, curious and mild, like he’s observing something through a storefront window, and David’s hands are toying with the strap of his book-bag, cracked and worn leather with taut seams where the heavy-looking books are pulling at it. He looks as uncomfortable as Jack’s ever seen him.

“Uh, Jack,” David says, gesturing to the boy beside him. “This is my friend, Simon Allman. Simon, this is my – this is Jack Kelly.”

Reluctantly, Jack holds out a hand to shake. Simon grasps Jack’s palm enthusiastically, and Jack notices the boy’s hands are warm and powdery-soft. As they shake, the boy looks down at their hands, curiosity still in his face, and Jack knows Simon must be able to feel the blisters and calluses all over his.

“Simon’s dad is the city clerk,” David says. “Simon and I work with him.”

“When we’re not studying,” Simon says with a smile.

There’s a pause. Jack eyes Simon, and he can feel Simon doing the same to him, though his face retains a soft, placid look. Jack’s been the subject of scrutiny from people better-dressed, richer, more powerful, better educated than him before, and he knows the condescension, well-meaning or not, that comes from having that gaze fixed on him, while they take in everything from the lumpy scar-tissue that healed badly under Jack’s eye, to the holes in his boots. He spreads his hands out, arms apart. “Ya wanna take my picture?”

Simon laughs. “My apologies. David has told me a great deal about you.” He looks over to David with a smile. “The famous Jack Kelly, who led the newsboys strike against Pulitzer last year, and in doing so has sparked _quite_ the conversation regarding child labor laws in this country.” He looks back at Jack then. “From the sound of it, your leadership abilities wouldn’t be out of place in the city council, or congress itself. We could do with better representation from - people like you.”

Jack is taken-aback, unused to the kind of earnest pomposity coming from this kid acting like a middle-aged politician with his airs and graces, and not sure he appreciates the patronising tone behind the compliments. David, for his part, has gone red in the face.

“Well, when I run for office, I’ll be sure to let ya know,” Jack says, into the silence.

Simon just smiles genially, then turns to David. “We should be on our way.” He touches the bend of David’s elbow, a soft and strangely intimate gesture that Jack notices with irrational and immediate attention. To Jack, Simon politely puts out his other hand. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

They shake, and the boy’s hands are slightly damp. He lets go, and it’s all he can do not to wipe his hand on the leg of his pants. By the way Simon’s own hand twitches, it seems he might be trying to do the same.

“I’ll catch up,” David says. “Go ahead, I’ll – be there later.”

“I’ll see you.” Simon squeezes David’s shoulder, and nods at Jack as he leaves.

There’s a pause.

“Looks like you’s running in real high-society circles these days,” Jack says, stiffly.

David folds his arms, defensive. “His father’s the city clerk, not the president.”

“Had some manner about him.”

“You said _I_ had a manner about me when we first met, too.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it? I know you don’t get on with _hoity-toity types_.” David says it like Jack does, leaning on the rough New York accent that’s always been more pronounced in Jack than David, and Jack doesn’t know if the impression of his voice stings, or pleases him. “But he’s – different. He’s a good man.”

“Didn’t seem much of a man to me.” Jack feels the words leaving him before he can stop them, and he reels for a second in their echo. It's the dead voice of Francis Sullivan coming from him, saying things about men with soft handshakes, men you can’t trust, men who aren’t real men at all.

David looks like Jack just struck him. He steps back.

“Wait,” Jack says, without thinking, grabbing David by the arm and pulling him in. David, caught off-balance, stumbles and puts his hands out on Jack’s chest, to keep himself from falling.

Any words Jack might have said disappear from his mind. There, on him, is David’s touch, something he’d missed so desperately for months without realising it. He finds himself hating winter, and their coats, wishing it were summer again, and he could feel David’s palms against his skin, their arms round each other like they’d always done before.

David is stood right up close to Jack, almost too close for Jack to be able to see all of him at once, noticing in fragments David’s nose red from the cold, the odd curls trapped just beneath the frames of his spectacles, the downturned line of his mouth and his lips, thin and open and waiting for an explanation.

And Jack, rooted, frozen, the slamming of his heartbeat against his ribs, knows with an unbearable clarity that even though he doesn’t have the words to explain, all he wants to do is pull David closer, feel the fullness of him under his hands, touch his hair, touch him, wherever he can, wherever David will let him, because _that’s_ the truth of it, the truth of what he feels.

“Jack?” David says, quiet. There are people around, walking hurriedly past in coats and hats, the puff of their breath following them like trails of cigarette smoke. Jack feels a stiffness in his joints like he’s been frozen solid. He licks his lips, numb and cold. David’s eyes flick down and then back up again. Jack sees him do it. He sees it. Then they grow wider, like David is seeing something clear as day on him, and Jack suddenly feels like he’s pitching headfirst, like he’s stepped off the edge of a building, falling.

“Medda’ll be wanting me back,” is all Jack manages to say. “I have to go.”

David steps back, his hands coming down to drop by his side, as Jack unclenches the fist he’d been holding too tight on David’s arm. Brave, David had called him, once, for the things he’d done, in the face of unbeatable odds, in danger and uncertainty.

As Jack turns and walks away, he’s never felt more of a coward.


	13. Chapter 13

In the small room he rents downtown, not a stone’s throw from the building with the charred old stairwell he used to sleep in, Jack’s lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling.

There’s mold, and brown water-lines tracking the bloom of old rain-stains in the cracks where the ceiling meets the four corners of the dusty drywall. Light from the sunset coming in through the finger-greasy window leaves ghostly burns in the shape of dark things on his eyelids when he blinks.

He’s slept so little recently, he feels dried-out and shrivelled, no energy for anything but to lie back on his bed and let his thoughts go where they want, too tired to stop them. They form a miasmic and muddy cloud in his mind, and while he can’t find any clearly-drawn lines to see through the fog, he can recognize at least one feeling in there.

He’d been working hard all day, and when he finally got out with damp stains on his pants and his hands smelling like lye-soap, he began to realize the gnawing in his guts wasn’t just the hour-lagged hunger in his belly and sleep deprivation, but the simple fact of missing someone with a hollow sort of painfulness that he didn’t know what to do with.

Not just someone. Of course it was David.

Jack closes his eyes. He can be honest, when nobody’s watching him. When he’s too tired to crawl through all the hiding places in his head.

Something hits his window with a sharp rattle. Sitting up with a start, Jack swallows and looks out to where the sun has faded to nothing but a chilled, orange glow, giving way to the night sky. There’s another sharp tap. Jack gets up and walks over to the single pane in the outer wall. Down below, past the fire escape and looking a little sweaty as if he’d run there, is David. When he spots Jack, he steps back, his arm paused, half-back, about to throw another stone. He gestures for Jack to open the window.

Slowly, feeling strangely numb, Jack opens the window and leans out. “You forget how to climb stairs?”

“I didn’t know which one was yours.”

“So ya thought you’d throw stones at all the windows ‘til ya hit the right one? Neighbours might have somethin’ to say about that.”

“Can I come up?”

Jack pauses. “Sure. Second floor.” He slides the window shut. The cold air from outside has made his skin prickle, and he shivers, rubbing his arms with cold, dry hands. It only takes a few minutes for there to be a knock at his door.

Jack lets David in, who walks inside without a word. Jack shuts the door quietly behind him, then turns and leans up against the closed door, hands behind his back, palms against the crackled wood. David, standing in the center of the small grey room, turns to face Jack, and his hands go to his elbows, arms crossed tight over his chest. “I had to ask Sarah where you lived.”

“Alright,” Jack says. David seems to be struggling with some internal debate, silent and still for a moment, before he walks across the room, comes up right up close in front of Jack.

“I wanted—” David says, and he puts his hands on either side of Jack’s face, rough with cold. “I was going to come after you, last week when you – after you left, but I lost you in the crowd, so I couldn’t follow you, and I didn’t know where you lived so I had to ask Sarah but she couldn’t remember the floor. I wanted – I wanted to find you sooner.”

“Alright,” Jack says again, stiff and stunned, at the way David’s touching him, so close and casual and tender without asking, without saying what it means.  

“I didn’t actually try all the neighbours’ windows. Yours was the first one I picked. Lucky guess. I don’t think anyone saw me come in.”

“Davey.” Jack can hear his voice, the way it catches.

“Jack. I should have come by to see you more. After the strike. I just thought you might want some time with Sarah. And then after Sarah, I thought you might want time alone.” David’s hands are restless, fingers walking to the back of Jack’s neck, then down to his shoulders, then back round again to rest on his collarbones. Jack’s whole skin feels tight, sensitive and taught over his bones. “To tell the truth – the truth is I felt guilty. Sarah said how you didn’t seem – after the strike, it seemed like you were – like you were real low, and she didn’t know how to help, and I didn’t know how to help either. I _should_ have helped – but then I went back to school and I thought you wouldn’t want to see me anymore so maybe it didn’t matter.”

Jack stares at David, trying to grasp his words. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because – things would be different, between us. The people around us – it would all be different.” David makes a face. “Wasn’t I right? You hated Simon, I could see that plain as day.”

Jack shrugs stiffly. “He ain’t so bad. I shouldn’a been rude like that.”

“It’s alright.” David smiles, wryly. “Wouldn’t be you if you weren’t a little rough with strangers. I know what you're like.” His thumb smudges over Jack’s cheekbone, then drops to the corner of his mouth.

Jack swallows. His skin is crawling with a strange, desperate desire. David and him, they’re talking, words filtering into the dusty silence in the dark room, but they’re not really _saying_ anything at all. Jack doesn’t know what words he would choose to put a shape to what he’s feeling. He doesn’t know how to say any of it.

David’s thumb is still at the corner of Jack’s lips, tugging as if to pull his mouth into a smile. Jack reaches up to push the hand away and David draws it back, looking embarrassed suddenly. Without thinking, Jack catches it.

There’s a pause, heavy and charged, and then Jack, feeling wild and terrified, leans in to close the space between them, and presses his mouth to David’s.

David makes a small sound in his chest, and Jack has the awful feeling that David will pull away, and Jack will be forced to see shock or anger there, but David just says, "Oh!" with a bright smile, then inches closer, so Jack has to tilt his head, and their mouths slide together, purposeful now instead of a guess.

Jack kisses deeper, trying to find something more that will satisfy the craving that he feels flaring suddenly, a yawning space of desire he hadn’t known could actually be filled. David opens his mouth too, and Jack finds the smooth, wet slide of David’s tongue behind the press of his teeth, a shocking revelation that makes him expel a hard breath.

Jack’s fingers grip the back of David’s shirt to stop his hands from shaking. David breaks the kiss for a moment to make a hushing sound, then smooths his hands down Jack’s shoulders.

“This is what I wanted,” David says. Of the two of them, David always was the one with the words. “I can't believe... From that day – you were so – I hadn’t ever met anyone like you. I didn’t know what to think. I just wanted to be around you. I wanted to touch you like this, all the time, but I didn’t – is it – did you want it too?”

“Yeah,” Jack says, and his voice feels blurred, distant, like it’s coming up from a well deep inside him. “Yeah, Davey.” He laughs then, feeling absurd and slightly manic as thoughts and feelings that had lain low for months suddenly bubble up and rise in him like a tide, a rush of embarrassment and honesty. “Didn’t wanna let you outta my sight. Wanted to soak anyone who ever laid a hand on ya. I wanted to be the only one – touchin’ you made me feel crazy. I didn’t know – I didn’t _know._ ”

Jack has no idea if he’s said too much, and what David must think of him, saying all these things – but David looks, impossibly, pleased, his cheeks slightly pink and a small smile on his lips. Then he hesitates, pauses for a moment, and says in a rush. “You know, whatever you might think, with – with Simon. He’s not. We haven’t—”

Jack doesn’t deny it, doesn’t tell David that he hadn’t come to that conclusion, that he hadn’t boiled with a strange jealousy that hurt him almost to his bones, an ache like the urge to crack his knuckles inside his whole body. “Good,” is all he says, a touch viciously, and his hands tug into David’s curls as he kisses him again.

There’s voices, a tumult of footsteps and shouts, families and children going between stairwells and corridors, babies crying through the floorboards and thuds from above, but they all seem faraway to Jack, a distant veil of noise apart from him. There’s only David’s soft, hitching breaths, the dull-bright skiff of Jack’s rough hands moving across David’s skin, the wet, voiceless sound of lips as they come together and apart again and again.

They’re impossible sounds, dreamlike, almost.

“You won’t leave, again?” David asks. “You can’t. I couldn’t take it. When you got in that carriage—”

Jack pulls his thumb over David’s lips, and wonders at his luck, at how he ended up here, at all the things he’d lost, he’d found, he’d broken, he’d fixed, at how much he’s done to wind up here. And David hadn’t ever asked him for anything more than he could give, except honesty – the truth of himself, instead of the stories he’d told, once.

“I won’t,” he promises, and means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you from the bottom of my heart to the people who read and commented and left kudos, i appreciate it so much.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and so we come to the epilogue, and last installment of this story. thank you SO much to everyone who read and commented on this story, it means the world.

Jack wakes David up by chucking a newspaper to his face.

David barely stirs, shifting only slightly to accommodate Jack’s body slipping under the blanket beside him, paper still tented above his head as he continues to breathe, deep and even and undisturbed. The paper bears the date _3 rd January 1900_. It’s a new century, and outside the city is easing into a January powdery with snow, fresh and stark and clean as the new year.

“Ain’t foolin’ me, Davey,” Jack murmurs, peeking below the pages of the morning edition of The World. “I know you’s awake.”

“Ain’t trying to fool ya,” David says, and his voice is low and thick with sleep. “Just not going to give you the satisfaction of the reaction you’re looking for.”

“And what reaction’s that?”

David’s eye cracks open under where Jack’s lifting the paper slightly off his face. “You want me to complain ‘bout you waking me up so’s you can let me know you’ve been up since sunrise and that I’m gettin’ lazy and that you’re a harder worker and a better man than me in every conceivable way.”

“I do work harder.”

“You work _earlier_. You enjoy it.”

“Maybe.” Jack moves the newspaper from David’s face and insinuates himself into the crook of David’s neck instead. “I like seein’ the day come up.”

It’s early still, and Jack had had to go in to Irving Hall at first light to handle a delivery that had taken twice as long since Cobb had busted his shoulder, leaving Jack to do double the heavy lifting. Cobb was a fair man, though, and instead of sitting there to boss Jack around, he’d given Jack charge on the handover, let him take the lead. Jack had tried not to puff himself up too much over it, but he’d enjoyed the responsibility, the respect he’d been shown, not to mention the extra cash. He’d tucked it away, a soft and quiet thought in his mind about David’s birthday coming up next month, and a pleased sort of stillness inside him when he came back to the flat, and saw David there, curled up on Jack’s bed, hair everywhichway and covers tucked up to his ears.

“It’ll be time for me to go soon,” David yawns. Jack hears the crack of his jaw from where he’s lying, ear close enough to David’s mouth to feel his breathing. “When will you be back?”

Jack’s fingers are moving back and forth across David’s collarbone. “Hafta go in again tonight, Medda’s big show. I’ll be there late.”

It’s the way it is, now, with them. They move in different worlds, separate schedules and a shrinking of freedom that comes from growing up. David’s world is inside wood-panelled rooms stacked to the high-arched ceilings with heavy books. It’s his studies, it’s the law, it’s men in suits and stacks of paper around him, late nights with his forehead pinched and glasses pushed up his nose. Jack’s world is early mornings in the dark during winter, sweat on his back and calluses on his hands and the pull of his joints. It’s men in overalls and girls in stockings and painted backdrops of places he’ll never see.

And yet, when they’re here, in Jack’s room together, sharing their breath and bodies, closer than Jack had ever imagined possible, Jack feels like they’ve stumbled into another world altogether, one that’s just for them, a home outside of everything else, and the only one he’ll ever need.

“C’mere,” David mumbles, soft-eyed and showing, like he always has, the plain truth of what he feels all across his face.

They kiss with the weight of all the things Jack’s learning, figuring out what to ask for, letting David see all the parts of him no one else had ever got to see. They touch that way too, a conversation and discovery, revealing themselves layer by layer.

“Davey,” Jack says, a little desperate, as David’s hand moves across the hard plane of his chest down to the softer part of his stomach, and down to where he’s hard again, hips rolling helplessly, making noises in the back of his throat he can’t stop.

David doesn’t hush him, chasing the sound instead with his lips and tongue, and his hand is tacky and slick on Jack, moving hard and fast and relentless, barely letting Jack breathe for the way it’s making him twist and whine, fingers dug into David’s shoulders, chasing that sharp, hot feeling that draws up tight inside him.

He holds onto David, like a port in a storm, and David holds him back as he shakes and falls apart.

“Maybe I’ll swing by and watch the performance,” David says, after, hair tugged over his forehead from where Jack’s hands were a moment ago.

Jack leans up onto an elbow, and he aches slightly, a physical feeling in his muscles and limbs, but in other ways too, a tenderness along the faultlines where pieces of him are gently starting to mold back together. He smiles. “Medda would love that, I bet.”

“And you?”

“I’d love that, too.”

David goes up on his elbows too, chest coming away from the bed and towards Jack, neck arched, mouth seeking. Jack slides a hand around the back of David’s head, draws him close into a long and searching kiss.

It’s cold in the early January morning, but the sun is starting to edge in through the window with its curtains thrown back, casting small squares of yellow light on the ground. Dust swirls frenetically in the shafts, buffeted in the air around them as they move together. Outside, unnoticed, the city carries on.


End file.
